Viewing Amazon ECS stopped task errors

If you have trouble starting a task, your task might be stopping because of application or configuration errors. For example, you run the task and the task displays a PENDING status and then disappears.

If your task was created by an Amazon ECS service, the actions that Amazon ECS takes to maintain the service are published in the service events. You can view the events in the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, the Amazon ECS API, or tools that use the SDKs and API. These events include Amazon ECS stopping and replaces a task because the containers in the task have stopped running, or have failed too many health checks from Elastic Load Balancing.

If your task ran on a container instance on Amazon EC2 or external computers, you can also look at the logs of the container runtime and the Amazon ECS Agent. These logs are on the host Amazon EC2 instance or external computer. For more information, see Viewing Amazon ECS container agent logs.

Procedure

Console

AWS Management Console

The following steps can be used to check stopped tasks for errors using the console. In order to see stopped tasks, you must change the filter option.

Stopped tasks only appear in the console for 1 hour.

1. Open the console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ecs/v2.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Clusters.

3. On the Clusters page, choose the cluster.

4. On the Cluster : name page, choose the Tasks tab.

5. Configure the filter to display stopped tasks. For Filter desired status, choose Stopped.

   The Stopped option displays your stopped tasks and Any desired status displays all of your tasks.

6. Choose the stopped task to inspect.

7. In the row for your stopped task, in the Last Status column, choose Stopped.

   A pop-up window displays the stopped reason.

AWS CLI

1. List the stopped tasks in a cluster. The output contains the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the task, which you need to describe the task.

   aws ecs list-tasks \
        --cluster cluster_name \
        --desired-status STOPPED \
        --region region

2. Describe the stopped task to retrieve the information. For more information, see describe-tasks in the AWS Command Line Interface Reference.

   aws ecs describe-tasks \
        --cluster cluster_name \
        --tasks arn:aws:ecs:region:account_id:task/cluster_name/task_ID \
        --region region

Use the following output parameters.

• stopCode - The stop code indicates why a task was stopped, for example ResourceInitializationError

• StoppedReason - The reason the task stopped.

• reason (in the containers structure) - The reason provide additional details about the stopped container.

Next steps

View your stopped tasks so you can get information about the cause. For more information, see Amazon ECS stopped tasks error messages.