How to use CloudWatch to check if you AWS RDS instance's is down

Question

I want to know when my RDS Instance is down (in a "failed" or other state). Going through this article: Monitoring Amazon RDS and looking at the Cloudwatch Metrics when trying to create an alarm, it doesn't seem possible to use CloudWatch to check the status directly (if its "available" or not).

Is my only option to use the other metrics to indirectly if its down (eg. CPU usage at 0%)? If so which metrics should I use?

Answer 1

You don't use CloudWatch for this. RDS will notify you of this sort of issue directly. You just need to setup event notification in RDS.

See documentation: Using Amazon RDS Event Notification