Container Insights

Use CloudWatch Container Insights to collect, aggregate, and summarize metrics and logs from your containerized applications and microservices. Container Insights is available for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and Kubernetes platforms on Amazon EC2. Container Insights supports collecting metrics from clusters deployed on AWS Fargate for both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.

CloudWatch automatically collects metrics for many resources, such as CPU, memory, disk, and network. Container Insights also provides diagnostic information, such as container restart failures, to help you isolate issues and resolve them quickly. You can also set CloudWatch alarms on metrics that Container Insights collects.

Container Insights collects data as performance log events using embedded metric format. These performance log events are entries that use a structured JSON schema that enables high-cardinality data to be ingested and stored at scale. From this data, CloudWatch creates aggregated metrics at the cluster, node, pod, task, and service level as CloudWatch metrics. The metrics that Container Insights collects are available in CloudWatch automatic dashboards, and are also viewable in the Metrics section of the CloudWatch console. Metrics are not visible until the container tasks have been running for some time.

When you deploy Container Insights, it automatically creates a log group for the performance log events. You don't need to create this log group yourself.

To help you manage your Container Insights costs, CloudWatch does not automatically create all possible metrics from the log data. However, you can view additional metrics and additional levels of granularity by using CloudWatch Logs Insights to analyze the raw performance log events.

With the original version of Container Insights, metrics collected and logs ingested are charged as custom metrics. With Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon EKS, Container Insights metrics and logs are charged per observation instead of being charged per metric stored or log ingested. For more information about CloudWatch pricing, see Amazon CloudWatch Pricing.

In Amazon EKS and Kubernetes, Container Insights uses a containerized version of the CloudWatch agent to discover all of the running containers in a cluster. It then collects performance data at every layer of the performance stack.

Container Insights supports encryption with the AWS KMS key for the logs and metrics that it collects. To enable this encryption, you must manually enable AWS KMS encryption for the log group that receives Container Insights data. This causes Container Insights to encrypt this data using the provided KMS key. Only symmetric keys are supported. Do not use asymmetric KMS keys to encrypt your log groups.

For more information, see Encrypt Log Data in CloudWatch Logs Using AWS KMS.

Supported platforms

Container Insights is available for Amazon Elastic Container Service, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, and Kubernetes platforms on Amazon EC2 instances.

CloudWatch agent container image

Amazon provides a CloudWatch agent container image on Amazon Elastic Container Registry. For more information, see cloudwatch-agent on Amazon ECR.