When starting an instance on Amazon EC2, how would I detect a failure, for instance, if there's no machine available to fulfill my request? I'm using one of the less-common machine types and am concerned it won't start up, but am having trouble finding out what message to look for to detect this.

I'm using the EC2 commandline tools to do this. I know I can look for 'running' when I do ec2-describe-instance to see if the machine is up, but don't know what to look for to see if the startup failed.

Thanks!