Viewing Container Insights metrics

After you have Container Insights set up and it is collecting metrics, you can view those metrics in the CloudWatch console.

For Container Insights metrics to appear on your dashboard, you must complete the Container Insights setup. For more information, see Setting up Container Insights.

This procedure explains how to view the metrics that Container Insights automatically generates from the collected log data. The rest of this section explains how to further dive into your data and use CloudWatch Logs Insights to see more metrics at more levels of granularity.

To view Container Insights metrics

1. Open the CloudWatch console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Insights, Container Insights.

3. In the drop-down box under Container Insights, choose Performance monitoring.

4. Use the drop-down boxes near the top to select the type of resource to view, as well as the specific resource.

You can set a CloudWatch alarm on any metric that Container Insights collects. For more information, see Using Amazon CloudWatch alarms

Note

If you have already set up CloudWatch Application Insights to monitor your containerized applications, the Application Insights dashboard appears below the Container Insights dashboard. If you have not already enabled Application Insights, you can do so by choosing Auto-configure Application Insights below the performance view in the Container Insights dashboard.

For more information about Application Insights and containerized applications, see Enable Application Insights for Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS resource monitoring.

Viewing the top contributors

For some of the views in Container Insights performance monitoring, you can also see the top contributors by memory or CPU, or the most recently active resources. This is available when you select any of the following dashboards in the drop-down box near the top of the page:

• ECS Services

• ECS Tasks

• EKS Namespaces

• EKS Services

• EKS Pods

When you are viewing one of these types of resources, the bottom of the page displays a table sorted initially by CPU usage. You can change it to sort by memory usage or recent activity. To see more about one of the rows in the table, you can select the checkbox next to that row and then choose Actions and choose one of the options in the Actions menu.

Using CloudWatch Logs Insights to view Container Insights data

Container Insights collects metrics by using performance log events with using embedded metric format. The logs are stored in CloudWatch Logs. CloudWatch generates several metrics automatically from the logs which you can view in the CloudWatch console. You can also do a deeper analysis of the performance data that is collected by using CloudWatch Logs Insights queries.

For more information about CloudWatch Logs Insights, see Analyze Log Data with CloudWatch Logs Insights. For more information about the log fields you can use in queries, see Container Insights performance log events for Amazon EKS and Kubernetes.

To use CloudWatch Logs Insights to query your container metric data

1. Open the CloudWatch console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Insights.

   Near the top of the screen is the query editor. When you first open CloudWatch Logs Insights, this box contains a default query that returns the 20 most recent log events.

3. In the box above the query editor, select one of the Container Insights log groups to query. For the following example queries to work, the log group name must end with performance.

   When you select a log group, CloudWatch Logs Insights automatically detects fields in the data in the log group and displays them in Discovered fields in the right pane. It also displays a bar graph of log events in this log group over time. This bar graph shows the distribution of events in the log group that matches your query and time range, not only the events displayed in the table.

4. In the query editor, replace the default query with the following query and choose Run query.

   STATS avg(node_cpu_utilization) as avg_node_cpu_utilization by NodeName
   | SORT avg_node_cpu_utilization DESC 
   

   This query shows a list of nodes, sorted by average node CPU utilization.

5. To try another example, replace that query with another query and choose Run query. More sample queries are listed later on this page.

   STATS avg(number_of_container_restarts) as avg_number_of_container_restarts by PodName
   | SORT avg_number_of_container_restarts DESC
   

   This query displays a list of your pods, sorted by average number of container restarts.

6. If you want to try another query, you can use include fields in the list at the right of the screen. For more information about query syntax, see CloudWatch Logs Insights Query Syntax.

To see lists of your resources

1. Open the CloudWatch console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Resources.

3. The default view is a list of your resources being monitored by Container Insights, and alarms that you have set on these resources. To see a visual map of the resources, choose Map view.

4. From the map view, you can pause your pointer over any resource in the map to see basic metrics about that resource. You can choose any resource to see more detailed graphs about the resource.

Use case: Seeing task-level metrics in Amazon ECS containers

The following example illustrates how to use CloudWatch Logs Insights to dive deeper into your Container Insights logs. For more examples, see the blog Introducing Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights for Amazon ECS.

Container Insights does not automatically generate metrics at the Task level of granularity. The following query displays task-level metrics for CPU and memory usage.

stats avg(CpuUtilized) as CPU, avg(MemoryUtilized) as Mem by TaskId, ContainerName
| sort Mem, CPU desc

Other sample queries for Container Insights

List of your pods, sorted by average number of container restarts

STATS avg(number_of_container_restarts) as avg_number_of_container_restarts by PodName
| SORT avg_number_of_container_restarts DESC

Pods requested vs. pods running

fields @timestamp, @message 
| sort @timestamp desc 
| filter Type="Pod" 
| stats min(pod_number_of_containers) as requested, min(pod_number_of_running_containers) as running, ceil(avg(pod_number_of_containers-pod_number_of_running_containers)) as pods_missing by kubernetes.pod_name 
| sort pods_missing desc

Count of cluster node failures

stats avg(cluster_failed_node_count) as CountOfNodeFailures 
| filter Type="Cluster" 
| sort @timestamp desc

Application log errors by container name

stats count() as countoferrors by kubernetes.container_name 
| filter stream="stderr" 
| sort countoferrors desc