Amazon CloudWatch collects and processes Amazon ECS data into readable, near real-time metrics that allow developers to gain a better perspective on how clusters and services are performing. Amazon ECS services launched using the Fargate launch type automatically provide CPU and memory utilization metrics, but additional metrics can be enabled at the cluster and service levels.

Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights collect, aggregate, and summarize various metrics from containerized applications. When enabled, CloudWatch container insights provide higher-level aggregated metrics at the cluster, service, and task levels. As a feature of CloudWatch, metrics provided by container insights can also be utilized to create alarms and trigger downstream workflows in an event-driven solution.

In this lab, you will explore the metrics provided by CloudWatch container insights. You will walk through the container insights dashboard to visualize ECS metrics, and also leverage the metrics to create a CloudWatch alarm.

Learning objectives

Upon completion of this intermediate-level lab, you will be able to:

• Enable CloudWatch container insights for an ECS cluster
• Explore CloudWatch container insight dashboards
• Create a CloudWatch alarm using ECS service metrics

Intended audiences

• Cloud Architects
• DevOps Engineers
• Software Engineers

Prerequisites

Familiarity with the following will be beneficial but is not required:

• Amazon Elastic Container Service
• Amazon CloudWatch

The following content can be used to fulfill the prerequisites:

• Use AWS Fargate for Serverless Deployment of Container Applications
• Introduction to CloudWatch