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 so that you can be proactive. 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 or JBoss Enterprise Web Server, established JON monitoring of both types of deployments is identical.
In case of a problem being detected by JON, Amazon CloudWatch or manual inspection common sources of diagnostic information are:
/var/log/jboss_user-data.out is the output of the startup configuration script and user custom script run from rc.local;
/var/cache/jboss-ec2-eap/ contains the actual user data and custom script used at instance start-up (for an EAP instance)
/var/cache/jboss-ec2-ews/ contains the actual user data used at instance start-up (for an EWS instance)
/var/log also contains all the logs collected from machine startup, JBoss AS, Tomcat, httpd and most other services.
Access to these files is only available via an SSH session. Refer to the Amazon EC Getting Started Guide for details on how to configure and establish an SSH session with an EC2 instance.
Issue
When trying to access the URL http://<public-DNS>:8080/hello, the browser reports an error status instead of the "Hello world" application.
Action
Confirm the instance's state is "running" and if not, start it.
Check the Security Group which applies to the instance and confirm that access via ports 22 and 80 or 8080 are enabled. If not, either modify the applicable Security Group or create a new one which permits access via these ports.
Check the application war file is inside the server deploy directory and see server log for any errors. Action:
Confirm that JBoss Enterprise Web Server is running by navigating to the URL http://<public-DNS>, checking that the "Red Hat Enterprise Web Server Test Page" is loaded.