Detailed Monitoring

Use detailed monitoring.

It's ~$3.50 per instance/month, and well worth the extra cost for the extra detail. 1 minute granularity is much better than 5 minute. You can have cases where a problem is hidden in the 5 minute breakdown, but shows itself quite clearly in the 1 minute graphs. This may not be useful for everyone, but it's made investigating some issues much easier for me.