Amazon Elastic Container Service Monitoring Integration

Amazon Elastic Container Service lets you run Dockerized applications on a managed clusters of EC2 instances with ease. With Site24x7's integration, you can now monitor utilization stats at both the cluster-level and service-level for both the EC2-launch type and Fargate-launch type.

ECS monitoring

Table of contents

Use case

Amazon ECS is a highly scalable container management service. Consider a use case where you have a container running in an ECS monitor. When you integrate your Amazon ECS with Site24x7, then ECS Cluster and ECS Cluster Service monitors will be created. If your cluster monitor is down or facing an issue, you can identify and track the issue with the alerts configured.

Benefits of the integration between Site24x7 and Amazon ECS

Site24x7's integration with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) enables you to monitor your Amazon ECS at cluster, container, services, and task level.

With the integration between Site24x7 and Amazon ECS, you can:

  • Monitor your resources with multiple metrics.
  • Configure thresholds and receive alerts when your cluster or container instance is down.
  • Get a detailed overview of services, tasks, and container instances along with container insight details in the form of graphs.

Prerequisites

  • For EC2 launch type, please make sure the Amazon ECS container instances are running the container agent version 1.4.0 or higher. Also, ensure the IAM role assigned to the container instances during launch has the permission ecs:StartTelemetrySession.
  • For Fargate launch type, the CloudWatch CPU and memory utilization metrics are collected automatically.

Setup

  • If you haven't done it already, please provide Site24x7 access to your AWS account by either creating an IAM User or IAM Role. Learn more
  • On the Integrate AWS Account page, please make sure the ECS Cluster checkbox is selected in the Services to be discovered field. Learn more.

Permissions

Please make sure the following read-level actions are present in the IAM policy assigned to the IAM User or IAM Role created for Site24x7. Learn more.

  • "ecs:ListServices",
  • "ecs:ListAccountSettings",
  • "ecs:ListTagsForResource",
  • "ecs:DescribeServices",
  • "ecs:ListContainerInstances",
  • "ecs:DescribeContainerInstances",
  • "ecs:DescribeClusters",
  • "ecs:ListClusters",
  • "ecs:ListTasks",
  • "ecs:DescribeTasks"

Poll frequency

Aggregated ECS metric data is collected as per the poll frequency set (1 minute to a day). Learn more.

Licensing

  • Each ECS cluster is considered a basic monitor.
  • Each ECS service running in your cluster is considered a basic monitor.

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Supported metrics

Cluster

The following metrics are collected across the cluster:

AttributeDescriptionStatisticsData type
CPU reservation Measures the percentage of CPU units that are reserved by running tasks in the cluster. Average Percent
Cluster CPU utilization Measures the percentage of CPU units that is used in the cluster. Average Percent
Memory Reservation Measures the percentage of memory that is reserved for running task in cluster. Average Percent
Cluster Memory utilization Measures the percentage of memory that is used in the cluster. Average Percent
Active Services Measures the number of active services running in the cluster.  Sum count
Pending task Measures the number of tasks that are in PENDING state.  Sum  count
Running task Measures the number of tasks that are in RUNNING state. Sum  count
Container instances Measures the number of containers instances registered to the cluster. Sum  count

Service

The following metrics are collected on a service-level:

AttributeDescriptionStatisticsData type
Service CPU utilization Measures the percentage of CPU units used in the service Average Percent
Service memory utilization Measures the percentage of memory used in the service. Average Percent
Pending tasks Measures the number of tasks in the service that are in the PENDING state. Sum count
Running tasks Measures the number of tasks in the service that are in the RUNNING state. Sum count

Container instance 

AttributeDescriptionStatisticsData type
EC2 pending tasks Measures the number of tasks in PENDING state per container instance. Sum Count
EC2 running tasks Measures the number of tasks in RUNNING task per container instance. Sum Count
CPU available Measures the number of CPU units available per container instance. Average Unit
Memory available Measures the number of memory units remaining on the container instance. Average MiB

Container insights

AttributeDescriptionStatisticsData type
CPU Utilized The CPU units used by tasks in a cluster. Average Unit
CPU Reserved The CPU units reserved by tasks in a cluster. Average Unit
Memory Utilized The memory being used by tasks in a cluster. Average MB
Memory Reserved The memory reserved by tasks in a cluster. Average MB
Network Recieve Bytes The number of bytes received by the resource in a cluster. Sum MB
Network Transmit Bytes The number of bytes transmitted by the resource in a cluster. Sum MB
Storage Read Bytes The number of bytes read from storage in a cluster. Sum MB
Storage Write Bytes The number of bytes written to storage in a cluster. Sum MB
Container Instance Count The number of EC2 instances running on an Amazon ECS agent that is registered with a cluster. Maximum Count
Deployment Count The number of deployments in the cluster. Maximum Count
Desired Task Count The desired number of tasks in the cluster. Maximum Count
Pending Task Count The number of tasks currently in the PENDING state. Maximum Count
Running Task Count The number of tasks currently in the RUNNING state. Maximum Count
Task Set Count The number of task sets in the service. Maximum Count

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Tasks

AttributeDescription
Tasks Failed Reports if the tasks stop or fail to start due to an error.

Task definition

AttributeDescriptionStatisticsData type
CPU Utilized The CPU units used by task definition in a cluster.  Average Unit
CPU Reserved The CPU units reserved by task definition in a cluster.  Average Unit
Memory Utilized The memory used by task definition in a cluster.  Average MB
Memory Reserved    The memory reserved by task definition in a cluster. Average MB
Number of Bytes Received The number of bytes received by the resource in a cluster.   Average MB
Number of Bytes Sent The number of bytes transmitted by the resource in a cluster.  Average MB
Storage Read Bytes The number of bytes read from the storage in a cluster.    Average MB
Storage Write Bytes   The number of bytes written to the storage in a cluster.   Average MB
Ephemeral Storage  The size of Ephemeral Storage. Average GB

Metadata

This task details provides the following information about the task's state and configuration.

AttributeDescription
Task ID The unique ID for the task. 
Task Definition The full task definition description. 
Cluster Name The short name of the cluster.
Launch type The launch type on which you task is running. Valid values are EC2 and Fargate.
Desired Status Displays the desired status of the task.
Last Status Shows the last know status of the task.
CPU Shows the number of CPU units used by the task. 
Memory Displays the amount of memory used by the task. 
Started by Shows the tag specified when a task is started. 
Version The version counter for the task.
Created at Shows the time stamp for when the task was created. 
Stopped at Shows the time stamp for when the task was stopped. 
Task Duration Displays the time difference between when the task was created and when the task was stopped.
Stopped Reason Shows the time duration between when a task transitioned from the RUNNING 
Connectivity Displays the connectivity status of the task. 
Connectivity at Shows the time stamp for when the task went to CONNECTED state. 
Execution stopped at Shows the time stamp for when execution stopped. 
Group The name of the task group associated with your task. 
Platform version The platform version on which your task is running. 

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Threshold configuration

To configure thresholds for your Site24x7-AWS ECS integrated monitor:

  1. Log in to your Site24x7 account and navigate to Admin > Configuration Profiles > Threshold and Availability.
  2. Click Add Threshold Profile.
  3. Select ECS Cluster/ECS Cluster Service from the Monitor Type drop-down menu, and provide an appropriate name in the Display Name field.

Forecast

Estimate future values of the following Amazon ECS Cluster Service performance metrics and make informed decisions about adding capacity or scaling your AWS infrastructure.

  • Service CPU utilization
  • Service Memory utilization
  • Running Tasks

Similarly, you can also view the forecast for the following metrics of Amazon ECS Cluster:

  • CPU Reservation
  • Cluster CPU Utilization
  • Memory Reservation
  • Cluster Memory Utilization
  • Container Instances

Viewing Site24x7's ECS data

To view your ECS data:

  1. Sign in to the Site24x7 console. 
  2. Click on AWS
  3. Choose the monitored AWS account.
  4. Choose ECS Cluster (or) ECS Cluster Service from the dropdown.
  5. From the list of monitored Clusters or Services, choose the ECS resource for which you want to view metrics for.
Forward Amazon ECS logs to AppLogs to identify and troubleshoot issues with your containerized applications.

Site24x7's ECS monitoring interface

You can view the following data in Site24x7's ECS monitoring interface:

Summary

Get an overview of cluster level metrics with time series charts in the Summary tab. These charts provide information about CPU Utilization, CPU Reservation, Memory Reservation, and Memory Utilization. The tab provides overall statistics, such as number of services, pending tasks, running tasks, and container instances created in a cluster.

Container Insights

Container Insights collects and analyzes metrics and logs from your containerized applications and microservices. When you configure Container Insights for your integrated monitor, you can obtain information about Fargate/EC2 level metrics, such as CPU Utilization, CPU Reservation, Memory Reservation, Memory Utilization, Network Traffic, Storage Traffic, and Container Instances in a time series chart.

Services

Services are used to run a certain number of task definitions simultaneously in an ECS Cluster. It lists the number of services in the cluster and its configuration details.The time series graph for service level CPU Utilization, Memory Utilization, and Number of Tasks with pending and running statuses are displayed.

Task Definition

A task definition is required to run Docker containers in Amazon ECS. The Task Definition tab shows a list of task definitions used to create tasks in a particular ECS cluster.

Instance

The Instance tab displays the list of container instances in the ECS Cluster and information about instances, like Memory Available, CPU Available, Pending Tasks, and Running Tasks.

Monitored Resources

The Monitored Resource tab displays the EC2 instances associated with the ECS Cluster.

Tasks

In Amazon ECS, containers are defined in the task definition which is used to run a task. A task is the execution of a task definition within a cluster. The Tasks tab displays the running, stopped, and pending tasks details.

Containers

The Containers tab displays container specific data which includes the Task Definition, Tasks, and their status.

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