Track Amazon Machine

I am running 开发者_开发问答a c1.medium machine. Once in a while, the machine becomes unresponsive. Is there a way to detect this?

My initial solution was to write a simple script which pings this machine every hour. But, this failed because, it was able to ping, yet was unresponsive(really weird!).

Is there a better way to monitor this?

then you have to define what unresponsive means. If unresponsive on http port(80) you can probe that specific port - the instance might be up but the process dead.