# Viewing Amazon ECS container health
<a name="view-container-health"></a>

You can view the container health in the console, and using the API in the `DescribeTasks` response. For more information, see [DescribeTasks](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AmazonECS/latest/APIReference/API_DescribeTasks.html) in the *Amazon Elastic Container Service API Reference*.

If you use logging for your container, for example Amazon CloudWatch Logs, you can configure the health check command to forward the container health output to your logs. Make sure to use `2&1` to catch both the `stdout` and `stderr` information. The following example uses `CMD-SHELL` because it requires shell features like the pipe (`>>`) and logical OR (`||`) operators:

```
"command": [
     "CMD-SHELL",
     "curl -f http://localhost/ >> /proc/1/fd/1 2>&1  || exit 1"
   ],
```