title: How do I set up CloudWatch to detect when an EC2 instance goes down?
body: <p>I've got an app running on AWS. How do I set up <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/" rel="noreferrer">Amazon CloudWatch</a> to notify me when the EC2 instance fails or is no longer responsive?</p>
  
  <p>I went through the CloudWatch screens, and it appears that you can monitor certain statistics, like CPU or disk utilization, but I didn't see a way to monitor an event like "the instance got an http request and took more than X seconds to respond."</p>