Monitoring tools for Amazon ECS

Amazon CloudWatch alarms – Watch a single metric over a time period that you specify, and perform one or more actions based on the value of the metric relative to a given threshold over a number of time periods. The action is a notification sent to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic or Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling policy. CloudWatch alarms do not invoke actions simply because they are in a particular state; the state must have changed and been maintained for a specified number of periods. For more information, see Monitor Amazon ECS using CloudWatch.

For services with tasks that use the Fargate launch type, you can use CloudWatch alarms to scale in and scale out the tasks in your service based on CloudWatch metrics, such as CPU and memory utilization. For more information, see Automatically scale your Amazon ECS service.

For clusters with tasks or services using the EC2 launch type, you can use CloudWatch alarms to scale in and scale out the container instances based on CloudWatch metrics, such as cluster memory reservation.

For your container instances that were launched with the Amazon ECS-optimized Amazon Linux AMI, you can use CloudWatch Logs to view different logs from your container instances in one convenient location. You must install the CloudWatch agent on your container instances. For more information, see Download and configure the CloudWatch agent using the command line in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide. You must also add the ECS-CloudWatchLogs policy to the ecsInstanceRole role. For more information, see Monitoring container instances permissions.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs – Monitor, store, and access the log files from the containers in your Amazon ECS tasks by specifying the awslogs log driver in your task definitions. For more information, see Send Amazon ECS logs to CloudWatch .

You can also monitor, store, and access the operating system and Amazon ECS container agent log files from your Amazon ECS container instances. This method for accessing logs can be used for containers using the EC2 launch type.

Amazon CloudWatch Events – Match events and route them to one or more target functions or streams to make changes, capture state information, and take corrective action. For more information, see Automate responses to Amazon ECS errors using EventBridge in this guide and EventBridge is the evolution of Amazon CloudWatch Events in the Amazon EventBridge User Guide.

Container Insights – Collect, aggregate, and summarize metrics and logs from your containerized applications and microservices. 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 allow high-cardinality data to be ingested and stored at scale. From this data, CloudWatch creates aggregated metrics at the cluster, 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.

AWS CloudTrail log monitoring – Share log files between accounts, monitor CloudTrail log files in real time by sending them to CloudWatch Logs, write log processing applications in Java, and validate that your log files have not changed after delivery by CloudTrail. For more information, see Log Amazon ECS API calls using AWS CloudTrail in this guide, and Working with CloudTrail Log Files in the AWS CloudTrail User Guide.

Runtime Monitoring – Detect threats for clusters and containers within your AWS environment. Runtime Monitoring uses a GuardDuty security agent that adds runtime visibility into individual Amazon ECS workloads, for example, file access, process execution, and network connections.

Amazon ECS console:

CloudWatch home page:

In addition, you can use CloudWatch to do the following:

Container health check - These are commands that run locally on a container and validate application health and availability. You configure these per container in your task definition.

AWS Trusted Advisor can help you monitor your AWS resources to improve performance, reliability, security, and cost effectiveness. Four Trusted Advisor checks are available to all users; more than 50 checks are available to users with a Business or Enterprise support plan. For more information, see AWS Trusted Advisor.

Trusted Advisor has these checks that relate to Amazon ECS:

AWS Compute Optimizer is a service that analyzes the configuration and utilization metrics of your AWS resources. It reports whether your resources are optimal, and generates optimization recommendations to reduce the cost and improve the performance of your workloads.

For more information, see AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations for Amazon ECS.