Telegraf is a software agent for sending time-series data to InfluxDB, an open-source time series database. It has hundreds of plugins to collect different types of time-series data. The http_response plugin sends HTTP/HTTPS requests to a list of URLs and sends metrics about the responses back to InfluxDB. To set up synthetic monitoring of AWS API endpoints using Telegraf and InfluxDB Cloud, one needs to create a configuration file that specifies the organization, bucket, and URLs to monitor. The configuration file also includes settings such as follow_redirects and response_timeout. A list of all AWS service endpoints can be compiled from the AWS documentation page or by running a command in Terminal. Monitoring AWS is necessary because AWS has its own Service Health Dashboard, which may not always provide accurate information about the availability of services. By using Telegraf and InfluxDB Cloud, developers can monitor their applications' performance and ensure that they are working as expected.