One of the many great things about the AWS ecosystem is the amount of tooling at your disposal. A very large portion of work for any operations team is the monitoring of the systems' health. These checks could be scratch-level checks such as CPU usage, RAM information, and disk information. However, monitoring applications is not an easy task.

When it comes to knowing whether or not a system is actually performing, it is more than just knowing if the hardware is fine: it's about knowing a slew of other information that changes based on the perspective of the operations team as well as the architecture of the application itself.

If it is a Java application, is the JVM configured and running as expected? If it's a PHP application, does the system have enough memory allocated to the engine? There are some questions that are fuzzy in nature. For example, if it's a database, are there any queries that are taking 'too long'?

The good thing is that AWS has created the...