Container Insights

🔍 What is CloudWatch Container Insights?

CloudWatch Container Insights helps you monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize containerized applications. It automatically collects metrics like:

• CPU, memory, network, and disk I/O usage

• Container-level logs

• Performance at task/pod, service, and cluster level

• ECS/EKS infrastructure and app telemetry

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✅ What It Works With:

• Amazon ECS (Fargate or EC2)

• Amazon EKS

• Kubernetes clusters on EC2

• Docker running on EC2 (with agent)

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🧱 Example: Enable Container Insights on ECS (Fargate or EC2)

🎯 Goal

Set up CloudWatch Container Insights on ECS and view metrics and logs.

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🚀 Step 1: Enable Insights via AWS CLI

Enable for a specific region:

aws ecs update-cluster-settings \
  --cluster your-cluster-name \
  --settings name=containerInsights,value=enabled

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📦 Step 2: Create a Task Definition with CloudWatch Logs

{
  "containerDefinitions": [
    {
      "name": "my-app",
      "image": "nginx",
      "logConfiguration": {
        "logDriver": "awslogs",
        "options": {
          "awslogs-group": "/ecs/my-app",
          "awslogs-region": "us-east-1",
          "awslogs-stream-prefix": "ecs"
        }
      }
    }
  ],
  "family": "my-app-task"
}

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🛠 Step 3: IAM Role Permissions for CloudWatch

Make sure the ECS task execution role has these permissions:

{
  "Effect": "Allow",
  "Action": [
    "logs:CreateLogStream",
    "logs:PutLogEvents",
    "logs:CreateLogGroup"
  ],
  "Resource": "*"
}

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📊 Step 4: View Insights in Console

Navigate to:

CloudWatch Console → Container Insights → Performance Monitoring

You’ll see:

• CPU & memory usage

• Network I/O per container

• Task/Pod performance

• ECS Service/Task/Cluster overview

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🧠 Bonus: Enable on EKS with cloudwatch-agent DaemonSet

Helm install (for EKS)

helm repo add aws-cloudwatch https://aws.github.io/eks-charts
helm install cloudwatch-agent aws-cloudwatch/cloudwatch-agent \
  --set cloudwatch.region=us-east-1 \
  --set clusterName=your-cluster-name \
  --set serviceAccount.create=true \
  --set serviceAccount.name=cloudwatch-agent \
  --namespace amazon-cloudwatch \
  --create-namespace

You’ll start seeing metrics like:

• Node-level CPU/mem

• Pod-level performance

• Cluster-wide aggregates

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📍 Summary

Feature	ECS	EKS
CPU/memory metrics	✅	✅
Auto log collection	✅	✅
DaemonSet required	❌	✅
Console UI (Insights)	✅	✅
Alerts (via Alarms)	✅	✅

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