Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) monitoring provides real-time visibility into your containerized workloads running on AWS ECS to ensure reliable performance and prevent resource bottlenecks in distributed systems. Using OpenTelemetry Collector, you get comprehensive monitoring through a flexible, vendor-neutral approach that works across both ECS on EC2 and ECS Fargate launch types.
Collector requirements
ECS monitoring requires the OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib distribution to access the AWS ECS Container Metrics receiver (awsecscontainermetricsreceiver). For more information, see the OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib GitHub repository.
Why ECS monitoring
- Prevent outages - Get alerts for container failures, resource exhaustion, and service health issues before they cause downtime
- Optimize performance - Identify CPU/memory bottlenecks, I/O constraints, and resource allocation issues that affect application speed
- Plan capacity - Track resource usage, task scaling patterns, and cluster utilization to scale proactively
- Ensure service availability - Monitor task health, service deployment status, and container lifecycle events
Common use case
Whether you're running microservices on ECS Fargate for serverless containers, or managing containerized applications on ECS with EC2 for cost optimization, ECS monitoring helps you catch issues before they impact your business. Get alerted when CPU utilization spikes threatening application performance, when memory usage approaches limits risking task termination, or when container health checks fail indicating service degradation. This monitoring is essential for web applications, API services, and any containerized workload where performance and availability directly impact user experience.
Get started
Ready to start monitoring your Amazon ECS environment? Choose your deployment type to get started with the appropriate setup guide.
How it works
The OpenTelemetry Collector runs as a sidecar container in your ECS task definitions to collect comprehensive metrics:
- AWS ECS Container Metrics receiver connects to ECS Task Metadata Endpoint v4 to collect container CPU, memory, network, and storage metrics
- Host Metrics receiver collects system-level metrics including CPU, memory, filesystem, disk, and network utilization (available on EC2, limited on Fargate)