Collecting container logs with Amazon ECS logs collector - Amazon Elastic Container Service
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Collecting container logs with Amazon ECS logs collector

If you are unsure how to collect all of the various logs on your container instances, you can use the Amazon ECS logs collector. It is available on GitHub for both Linux and Windows. The script collects general operating system logs as well as Docker and Amazon ECS container agent logs, which can be helpful for troubleshooting Amazon Web Services Support cases. It then compresses and archives the collected information into a single file that can easily be shared for diagnostic purposes. It also supports enabling debug mode for the Docker daemon and the Amazon ECS container agent on Amazon Linux variants, such as the Amazon ECS-optimized AMI. Currently, the Amazon ECS logs collector supports the following operating systems:

  • Amazon Linux

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

  • Debian 8

  • Ubuntu 14.04

  • Ubuntu 16.04

  • Ubuntu 18.04

  • Windows Server 2016

Note

The source code for the Amazon ECS logs collector is available on GitHub for both Linux and Windows. We encourage you to submit pull requests for changes that you would like to have included. However, Amazon Web Services doesn't currently support running modified copies of this software.

To download and run the Amazon ECS logs collector for Linux

  1. Connect to your container instance.

  2. Download the Amazon ECS logs collector script.

    curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/awslabs/ecs-logs-collector/master/ecs-logs-collector.sh

  3. Run the script to collect the logs and create the archive.

    Note

    To enable the debug mode for the Docker daemon and the Amazon ECS container agent, add the --mode=enable-debug option to the following command. This might restart the Docker daemon, which kills all containers that are running on the instance. Consider draining the container instance and moving any important tasks to other container instances before enabling debug mode. For more information, see Draining Amazon ECS container instances.

    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo bash ./ecs-logs-collector.sh
Important

We recommend that you edit the logs and remove all sensitive data from the files. You can search for known data, and also search for environment variables such as AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID , AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY , and AWS_SESSION_TOKEN in the file.

After you have run the script, you can examine the collected logs in the collect folder that the script created. The collect.tgz file is a compressed archive of all of the logs, which you can share with Amazon Web Services Support for diagnostic help.

To download and run the Amazon ECS logs collector for Windows

  1. Connect to your container instance. For more information, see Connecting to Your Windows Instance in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

  2. Download the Amazon ECS logs collector script using PowerShell.

    Invoke-WebRequest -OutFile ecs-logs-collector.ps1 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/awslabs/aws-ecs-logs-collector-for-windows/master/ecs-logs-collector.ps1

  3. Run the script to collect the logs and create the archive.

    Note

    To enable the debug mode for the Docker daemon and the Amazon ECS container agent, add the -RunMode debug option to the following command. This restarts the Docker daemon, which kills all containers that are running on the instance. Consider draining the container instance and moving any important tasks to other container instances before enabling debug mode. For more information, see Draining Amazon ECS container instances.

    .\ecs-logs-collector.ps1
Important

We recommend that you edit the logs and remove all sensitive data from the files. You can search for known data, and also search for environment variables such as AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID , AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY , and AWS_SESSION_TOKEN in the file.

After you have run the script, you can examine the collected logs in the collect folder that the script created. The collect.tgz file is a compressed archive of all of the logs, which you can share with Amazon Support for diagnostic help.