Docker diagnostics in Amazon ECS - Amazon Elastic Container Service
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Docker diagnostics in Amazon ECS

Docker provides several diagnostic tools that help you troubleshoot problems with your containers and tasks. For more information about all of the available Docker command line utilities, see the Docker Command Line topic in the Docker documentation. You can access the Docker command line utilities by connecting to a container instance using SSH.

The exit codes that Docker containers report can also provide some diagnostic information (for example, exit code 137 means that the container received a SIGKILL signal). For more information, see Exit Status in the Docker documentation.

List Docker containers in Amazon ECS

You can use the docker ps command on your container instance to list the running containers. In the following example, only the Amazon ECS container agent is running. For more information, see docker ps in the Docker documentation.

docker ps

Output:

CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES cee0d6986de0 amazon/amazon-ecs-agent:latest "/agent" 22 hours ago Up 22 hours 127.0.0.1:51678->51678/tcp ecs-agent

You can use the docker ps -a command to see all containers (even stopped or killed containers). This is helpful for listing containers that are unexpectedly stopping. In the following example, container f7f1f8a7a245 exited 9 seconds ago, so it doesn't show up in a docker ps output without the -a flag.

docker ps -a

Output:

CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES db4d48e411b1 amazon/ecs-emptyvolume-base:autogenerated "not-applicable" 19 seconds ago ecs-console-sample-app-static-6-internalecs-emptyvolume-source-c09288a6b0cba8a53700 f7f1f8a7a245 busybox:buildroot-2014.02 "\"sh -c '/bin/sh -c 22 hours ago Exited (137) 9 seconds ago ecs-console-sample-app-static-6-busybox-ce83ce978a87a890ab01 189a8ff4b5f0 httpd:2 "httpd-foreground" 22 hours ago Exited (137) 40 seconds ago ecs-console-sample-app-static-6-simple-app-86caf9bcabe3e9c61600 0c7dca9321e3 amazon/ecs-emptyvolume-base:autogenerated "not-applicable" 22 hours ago ecs-console-sample-app-static-6-internalecs-emptyvolume-source-90fefaa68498a8a80700 cee0d6986de0 amazon/amazon-ecs-agent:latest "/agent" 22 hours ago Up 22 hours 127.0.0.1:51678->51678/tcp ecs-agent

View Docker Logs in Amazon ECS

You can view the STDOUT and STDERR streams for a container with the docker logs command. In this example, the logs are displayed for the dc7240fe892a container and piped through the head command for brevity. For more information, go to docker logs in the Docker documentation.

Note

Docker logs are only available on the container instance if you are using the default json log driver. If you have configured your tasks to use the awslogs log driver, then your container logs are available in CloudWatch Logs. For more information, see Send Amazon ECS logs to CloudWatch .

docker logs dc7240fe892a | head

Output:

AH00558: httpd: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 172.17.0.11. Set the 'ServerName' directive globally to suppress this message AH00558: httpd: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 172.17.0.11. Set the 'ServerName' directive globally to suppress this message [Thu Apr 23 19:48:36.956682 2015] [mpm_event:notice] [pid 1:tid 140327115417472] AH00489: Apache/2.4.12 (Unix) configured -- resuming normal operations [Thu Apr 23 19:48:36.956827 2015] [core:notice] [pid 1:tid 140327115417472] AH00094: Command line: 'httpd -D FOREGROUND' 10.0.1.86 - - [23/Apr/2015:19:48:59 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 348 10.0.0.154 - - [23/Apr/2015:19:48:59 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 348 10.0.1.86 - - [23/Apr/2015:19:49:28 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 348 10.0.0.154 - - [23/Apr/2015:19:49:29 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 348 10.0.1.86 - - [23/Apr/2015:19:49:50 +0000] "-" 408 - 10.0.0.154 - - [23/Apr/2015:19:49:50 +0000] "-" 408 - 10.0.1.86 - - [23/Apr/2015:19:49:58 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 348 10.0.0.154 - - [23/Apr/2015:19:49:59 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 348 10.0.1.86 - - [23/Apr/2015:19:50:28 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 348 10.0.0.154 - - [23/Apr/2015:19:50:29 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 348 time="2015-04-23T20:11:20Z" level="fatal" msg="write /dev/stdout: broken pipe"

Inspect Docker Containers in Amazon ECS

If you have the Docker ID of a container, you can inspect it with the docker inspect command. Inspecting containers provides the most detailed view of the environment in which a container was launched. For more information, see docker inspect in the Docker documentation.

docker inspect dc7240fe892a

Output:

[{ "AppArmorProfile": "", "Args": [], "Config": { "AttachStderr": false, "AttachStdin": false, "AttachStdout": false, "Cmd": [ "httpd-foreground" ], "CpuShares": 10, "Cpuset": "", "Domainname": "", "Entrypoint": null, "Env": [ "PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/local/apache2/bin", "HTTPD_PREFIX=/usr/local/apache2", "HTTPD_VERSION=2.4.12", "HTTPD_BZ2_URL=https://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/httpd-2.4.12.tar.bz2" ], "ExposedPorts": { "80/tcp": {} }, "Hostname": "dc7240fe892a", ...