# Best practices for monitoring Amazon ECS
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Use the following best practices for monitoring Amazon ECS.
+ Make monitoring a priority to head off small problems before they become big ones
+ Create a monitoring plan that includes answers to the following question
  + What are your monitoring goals?
  + What resources will you monitor?
  + How often will you monitor these resources?
  + What monitoring tools will you use?
  + Who will perform the monitoring tasks?
  + Who should be notified when something goes wrong?
+ Automate monitoring as much as possible.
+ Check the Amazon ECS log files. For more information, see [Viewing Amazon ECS container agent logs](logs.md).
+ Use Runtime Monitoring to help protect your accounts, containers, workloads, and the data within your AWS environment. For more information, see [Identify unauthorized behavior using Runtime Monitoring](ecs-guard-duty-integration.md).