Monitor Amazon ECS containers using Container Insights with enhanced observability

Container Insights collects, aggregates, and summarizes metrics and logs from your containerized applications and microservices. provides all the Container Insights metrics, plus additional task and container metrics.

Container Insights discovers all the running containers in a cluster and collects performance data at every layer of the performance stack. Operational data is collected as performance log events. These are entries that use a structured JSON schema for high-cardinality data to be ingested and stored at scale. From this data, CloudWatch creates higher-level aggregated metrics at the cluster, service, and task level as CloudWatch metrics. The metrics include utilization for resources such as CPU, memory, disk, and network. The metrics are available in CloudWatch automatic dashboards.

The metrics only reflect the resources with running tasks during the specified time range. For example, if you have a cluster with one service in it but that service has no tasks in a RUNNING state, there will be no metrics sent to CloudWatch. If you have two services and one of them has running tasks and the other doesn't, only the metrics for the service with running tasks will be sent.

On December 2, 2024, Amazon released Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon ECS. This version supports enhanced observability for Amazon ECS clusters using the Amazon EC2 and Fargate launch types After you configure Container Insights with enhanced observability on Amazon ECS, Container Insights auto-collects detailed infrastructure telemetry from the cluster level down to the container level in your environment and displays these critical performance data in curated dashboards removing the heavy lifting in observability set-up. For information about how to set up Container Insights with enhanced observability, see Container Insights with enhanced observability.

We recommend that you use Container Insights with enhanced observability instead of Container Insights because it provides detailed visibility in your container environment, reducing the mean time to resolution. For more information, see Amazon ECS Container Insights with enhanced observability metrics in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

The events that you can view are the ones that Amazon ECS sends to Amazon EventBridge. For more information, see Amazon ECS events.