With EC2, we also have the ability to perform basic troubleshooting and recovery by monitoring the status check metric of our instance. As soon as the status check is undetermined or failed, we can trigger an alarm that will auto-recover or reboot our instance so that it is restarted on another host and the status check is resolved. This is a really good feature to implement on any mission-critical instances or instances that cannot be clustered due to licensing or other limitations:

1. To enable the status check alarm, we simply need to navigate to the EC2 management console and select our instance. Then we select the Status Check tab from the instance properties and click on Create Status Check Alarm: 

2. In the Create Alarm dialogue, we can select whether to send a notification or take an action on the instance (or both). We also have the ability to control under what condition to trigger the alarm. When finished, we simply click Create Alarm:

3. A pop-up window appears that informs us of the alarm's creation, and a link that will lead us directly to the alarm is presented. We can either click the link or click Close if we are done:

4. Clicking on the link provided in the previous dialogue will display the alarm in the Alarms section of the CloudWatch management console:

We have now created an alarm that will perform an action if our instance fails a status check.