Using Container Insights - Amazon CloudWatch
Supported platformsCloudWatch agent container imageSupported Regions

Using 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 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 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.

CloudWatch does not automatically create all possible metrics from the log data, to help you manage your Container Insights costs. However, you can view additional metrics and additional levels of granularity by using CloudWatch Logs Insights to analyze the raw performance log events.

Metrics collected by Container Insights are charged as custom metrics. 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 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 AWS KMS key. Only symmetric keys are supported. Do not use asymmetric AWS KMS keys to encrypt your log groups.

For more information, see Encrypt Log Data in CloudWatch Logs Using AWS KMS.

Supported platforms

Container Insights is available for Amazon Elastic Container Service, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, and Kubernetes platforms on Amazon EC2 instances.

  • For Amazon ECS, Container Insights collects metrics at the cluster, task and service levels on both Linux and Windows Server instances. It can collect metrics at the instance-level only on Linux instances.

    For Amazon ECS, network metrics are available only for containers in bridge network mode and awsvpc network mode. They are not available for containers in host network mode.

  • For Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, and Kubernetes platforms on Amazon EC2 instances, Container Insights is supported only on Linux 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.

Supported Regions

Container Insights for Amazon ECS is supported in the following Regions:

  • US East (N. Virginia)

  • US East (Ohio)

  • US West (N. California)

  • US West (Oregon)

  • Africa (Cape Town)

  • Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)

  • Asia Pacific (Hyderabad)

  • Asia Pacific (Jakarta)

  • Asia Pacific (Mumbai)

  • Asia Pacific (Osaka)

  • Asia Pacific (Seoul)

  • Asia Pacific (Singapore)

  • Asia Pacific (Tokyo)

  • Asia Pacific (Sydney)

  • Canada (Central)

  • Europe (Frankfurt)

  • Europe (Ireland)

  • Europe (London)

  • Europe (Milan)

  • Europe (Paris)

  • Europe (Spain)

  • Europe (Stockholm)

  • Europe (Zurich)

  • Middle East (Bahrain)

  • Middle East (UAE)

  • South America (São Paulo)

  • AWS GovCloud (US-East)

  • AWS GovCloud (US-West)

  • China (Beijing)

  • China (Ningxia)

Supported Regions for Amazon EKS and Kubernetes

Container Insights for Amazon EKS and Kubernetes is supported in the following Regions:

  • US East (N. Virginia)

  • US East (Ohio)

  • US West (N. California)

  • US West (Oregon)

  • Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)

  • Asia Pacific (Mumbai)

  • Asia Pacific (Seoul)

  • Asia Pacific (Singapore)

  • Asia Pacific (Sydney)

  • Asia Pacific (Tokyo)

  • Canada (Central)

  • China (Beijing)

  • China (Ningxia)

  • Europe (Frankfurt)

  • Europe (Ireland)

  • Europe (London)

  • Europe (Paris)

  • Europe (Stockholm)

  • Middle East (Bahrain)

  • South America (São Paulo)

  • AWS GovCloud (US-East)

  • AWS GovCloud (US-West)