Using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry

You can set up Container Insights to collect metrics from Amazon EKS clusters by using the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry collector. For more information about the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, see AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry.

Important

If you install using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, you install Container Insights but do not get Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon EKS. You will not collect the detailed metrics supported in Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon EKS.

How you set up Container Insights depends on whether the cluster is hosted on Amazon EC2 instances or on AWS Fargate.

Amazon EKS clusters hosted on Amazon EC2

If you have not already done so, make sure that you have fulfilled the prerequisites including the necessary IAM roles. For more information, see Verifying prerequisites for Container Insights in CloudWatch.

Amazon provides a Helm chart that you can use to set up the monitoring of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service on Amazon EC2. This monitoring uses the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry(ADOT) Collector for metrics and Fluent Bit for logs. Therefore, the Helm chart is useful for customers who use Amazon EKS on Amazon EC2 and want to collect metrics and logs to send to CloudWatch Container Insights. For more information about this Helm chart, see ADOT Helm chart for EKS on EC2 metrics and logs to Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights.

Alternatively, you can also use the instructions in the rest of this section.

First, deploy the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry collector as a DaemonSet by entering the following command.

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aws-observability/aws-otel-collector/main/deployment-template/eks/otel-container-insights-infra.yaml |
kubectl apply -f -

To confirm that the collector is running, enter the following command.

kubectl get pods -l name=aws-otel-eks-ci -n aws-otel-eks

If the output of this command includes multiple pods in the Running state, the collector is running and collecting metrics from the cluster. The collector creates a log group named aws/containerinsights/cluster-name/performance and sends the performance log events to it.

For information about how to see your Container Insights metrics in CloudWatch, see Viewing Container Insights metrics.

AWS has also provided documentation on GitHub for this scenario. If you want to customize the metrics and logs published by Container Insights, see https://aws-otel.github.io/docs/getting-started/container-insights/eks-infra.

Amazon EKS clusters hosted on Fargate

For instructions for how to configure and deploy an ADOT Collector to collect system metrics from workloads deployed to an Amazon EKS cluster on Fargate and send them to CloudWatch Container Insights, see Container Insights EKS Fargate in the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry documentation.