Use a custom setup to enable Application Signals on Amazon ECS - Amazon CloudWatch

Use a custom setup to enable Application Signals on Amazon ECS

Use these custom setup instructions to onboard your applications on Amazon ECS to CloudWatch Application Signals. You install and configure the CloudWatch agent and AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry yourself.

There are two methods for deploying Application Signals on Amazon ECS. Choose the one that is best for your environment.

  • Sidecar strategy– You add a CloudWatch agent sidecar container to each task definition in the cluster.

    Advantages:

    • Supports both the ec2 and Fargate launch types.

    • You can always use localhost as the IP address when you set up environment variables.

    Disadvantages:

    • You must set up the CloudWatch agent sidecar container for each service task that runs in the cluster.

    • Only the awsvpc network mode is supported.

  • Daemon strategy– You add a CloudWatch agent task only once in the cluster, and the Amazon ECS daemon scheduling strategy deploys it as needed. The ensures that each instance continuously receives traces and metrics, providing centralized visibility without the need for the agent to run as a sidecar with each application task definition.

    Advantages:

    • You need to set up the daemon service for the CloudWatch agent only once in the cluster.

    Disadvantages:

    • Doesn't support the Fargate launch type.

    • If you use the awsvpc or bridge network mode, you have to manually specify each container instance's private IP address in the environment variables.

With either method, on Amazon ECS clusters Application Signals doesn't autodiscover the names of your services. You must specify your service names during the custom setup, and the names that you specify are what is displayed on Application Signals dashboards.

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