Monitor workloads using Amazon ECS metadata

You can use the task and container metadata to troubleshoot your workloads and to make configuration changes based on the runtime environment.

Metadata includes the following categories:

• Task-level attributes that provide information about where the task is running.

• Container-level attributes that provide the Docker ID, name, and image details.

  This provides visibility into the container.

• Network settings such as IP addresses, subnets, and network mode.

  This helps with network configuration and troubleshooting.

• Task status and health

  This lets you know if the tasks are running.

You can view metadata by any of the following methods:

• Container metadata file

  Beginning with version 1.15.0 of the Amazon ECS container agent, various container metadata is available within your containers or the host container instance. By enabling this feature, you can query the information about a task, container, and container instance from within the container or the host container instance. The metadata file is created on the host instance and mounted in the container as a Docker volume and therefore is not available when a task is hosted on AWS Fargate.

• Task metadata endpoint

  The Amazon ECS container agent injects an environment variable into each container, referred to as the task metadata endpoint which provides various task metadata and Docker stats to the container.

• Container introspection

  The Amazon ECS container agent provides an API operation for gathering details about the container instance on which the agent is running and the associated tasks running on that instance.