How to Set Up Real-Time Status Monitoring for Your Entire AWS Infrastructure

AWS is the most-monitored service in PulsAPI, and for good reason: most modern applications depend on multiple AWS services simultaneously. The problem with traditional AWS health monitoring is that 'AWS is down' is almost never the accurate statement. It's 'S3 in us-east-1 is degraded,' or 'Lambda in eu-west-2 has elevated error rates,' or 'DynamoDB's global secondary indexes are experiencing increased latency.'

If your monitoring only tells you 'AWS has issues,' you still have to manually dig through the AWS Health Dashboard to find the affected service and region. That manual step — typically 3 to 8 minutes — is the difference between catching an issue before users notice and learning about it from a support ticket.

PulsAPI monitors AWS at the component level: individual services (EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, CloudFront, ECS, and 20+ more) across all regions. When you configure alerts for the specific components your application uses, you'll receive targeted notifications that tell you exactly what's affected and where.

Before setting up monitoring, audit which AWS services your application actually depends on. A simple architecture review usually surfaces this: your application servers (EC2 or ECS/EKS), your data layer (RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache), your storage (S3), your CDN (CloudFront), your auth (Cognito), your compute functions (Lambda), and any messaging (SQS, SNS, EventBridge).

Be specific about regions. If your application runs in us-east-1 with a failover in eu-west-1, you need monitoring for both regions. A us-west-2 S3 outage may not affect you at all, but a us-east-1 RDS outage is critical. Component-level alerts without region specificity generate noise; region-specific alerts are actionable.

Write this list down: you'll use it to configure your PulsAPI subscriptions and alert rules in the next steps.

Sign in to PulsAPI and navigate to the AWS service page at pulsapi.com/services/aws. From there, you can view all tracked AWS components. Subscribe to the specific components from your dependency list.

For each subscribed component, you'll see real-time status, 30-day uptime history, recent incidents, and community signals. Components update every 60 seconds, and any status change triggers your configured alert rules.

If you're on a Pro or higher plan, also check the component pages for related AWS services your application uses indirectly — CloudWatch, IAM, Route 53, ACM. These services don't usually cause user-facing incidents, but IAM degradation can cascade into authentication failures across everything.

Generic 'alert me on anything' rules generate noise that leads to alert fatigue. Set up tiered alerting: critical components (your primary database, main compute layer) should page on-call immediately. Supporting components (logging, monitoring tools) should post to Slack without paging. Informational components (unused regions, experimental services) can be visible on the dashboard without any alerts.

Use PulsAPI's severity filters to route correctly: Major Outage events should trigger PagerDuty on-call escalation. Partial Outage and Degraded events should go to your team's Slack #incidents channel. Maintenance windows should be suppressed or sent to a low-priority digest.

Test your alert rules before you need them. PulsAPI's Integrations Hub has a Test button for each channel. Send a test alert, verify it arrives in your Slack channel and PagerDuty, and confirm the severity mapping is what you expect. A misconfigured alert rule discovered during an incident is far more costly than 10 minutes of setup time.

AWS publishes SLA commitments for most services — typically 99.9% to 99.99% uptime. With PulsAPI's 90-day SLA tracking, you can measure whether AWS is actually meeting those commitments for the components and regions you depend on.

On the Pro plan, export your SLA reports quarterly for vendor reviews. If AWS S3 in us-east-1 has delivered 99.87% uptime against a 99.9% SLA commitment over the past quarter, you have documentation for service credit claims. Enterprise customers can set custom SLA targets in PulsAPI to track against the specific uptime guarantees in their AWS Enterprise Support or Dedicated contracts.

Over time, your PulsAPI SLA data builds an objective reliability record for every AWS dependency — turning vendor accountability from a gut feeling into a data-driven conversation.