I'm creating AWS servers using chef. I am also planning on enabling auto-scaling. While we have automatic monitoring setup already (server density or nagios etc), I was also going to setup the cloud watch alarm for the status check on the server.

This led me down the path of trying to decide whether to install the ec2-command-line tools on the server itself (which then requires me to install java on the servers -- despite no other need for Java in our environment) or to possible have an "admin" box that will check periodically for servers and make sure they have their alarms set.

I expect this paradigm to carry over to other things we want to configure (perhaps ensuring that termination protection is setup on production servers?).

Any thoughts as to why to go one direction or another?