Personally, if I were just starting something (assuming non-aws), I would use a free pinging service or write a quick cron to do it. In the event that it did no

Personally, if I were just starting something (assuming non-aws), I would use a free pinging service or write a quick cron to do it. In the event that it did not come back healthy, I would either send myself an email or an sms - the health check can also report error counts or use storage to track number of restarts per unit of time. Logging would just be some basic logging rotation and stdout piped to that file. Basic metrics could be as simple as a metrics table that you can query with SQL. When you eventually need fancy graphs (maybe a bit later), there are lots of options. I'm not overly familiar with aws services, but I'd be very surprised they don't give a basic good-enough solution to this with cloudwatch, which is even less work than outlined above.