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.

Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon EKS

On November 6, 2023, a new version of Container Insights was released. This version supports enhanced observability for Amazon EKS clusters running on Amazon EC2 and can collect more detailed metrics from these clusters. After installation, it automatically collects detailed infrastructure telemetry and container logs for your Amazon EKS clusters. You can then use curated, immediately usable dashboards to drill down into application and infrastructure telemetry.

Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon EKS collects granular health, performance, and status metrics up to the container level, and also control plane metrics. For more information about the additional metrics and dimensions collected, see Amazon EKS and Kubernetes Container Insights metrics.

If you installed Container Insights by using the CloudWatch agent on an Amazon EKS cluster on Amazon EC2 after November 6, 2023, you have Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon EKS. Otherwise, you can upgrade an Amazon EKS cluster to this new version by following the instructions in Upgrading to Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon EKS in CloudWatch.

Container Insights supports CloudWatch cross-account observability. You use a single monitoring account to monitor and troubleshoot your applications that span multiple AWS accounts within a single Region. For more information, see CloudWatch cross-account observability.

Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon EKS also supports Windows worker nodes.

Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon EKS is not supported on Fargate.

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.