EC2 does not provide any method out of the box to indicate an instance has started correctly and services are running properly. Use of an external system for monitoring and management is recommended. JBoss Operations Network (JON) can automatically discover, monitor and manage many services on an EC2 instance with the JON agent installed, including JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and its services, Tomcat, Httpd, PostgreSQL, etc. Since there's no difference between an EC-hosted or locally-hosted instance of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, established JON monitoring of both types of deployments is identical.