Configuring failover in a private hosted zone

If you're creating failover records in a private hosted zone, note the following:

• Route 53 health checkers are outside the VPC. To check the health of an endpoint within a VPC by IP address, you must assign a public IP address to the instance in the VPC.

• You can create a CloudWatch metric, associate an alarm with the metric, and then create a health check that is based on the data stream for the alarm. For example, you might create a CloudWatch metric that checks the status of the EC2 StatusCheckFailed metric, add an alarm to the metric, and then create a health check that is based on the data stream for the alarm to check instances within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that only have private IP addresses. For information about creating CloudWatch metrics and alarms by using the CloudWatch console, see the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

For more information, see Working with private hosted zones and Monitoring health checks using CloudWatch.