The ECS EC2 Collection Agent runs one OpenTelemetry Collector task on every container instance of an Amazon ECS cluster, as an ECS daemon service, on EC2 container instances and on external instances registered through ECS Anywhere. It collects host metrics, container metrics, container and host logs, and telemetry from your applications.
The ECS EC2 Collection Agent primarily performs the following:
- Collects host metrics and per-container metrics from each container instance.
- Tails the logs of the containers on each container instance.
- Collects the host logs and the ECS agent logs of each container instance.
- Receives OTLP traces, metrics, and logs from your applications and forwards them to SigNoz.
How it works
Agent (daemon service)
The agent runs as the signoz-collector-agent ECS daemon service, so one collector task runs on every container instance in your cluster. It collects instance-level and container-level data:
- Host metrics: CPU, memory, disk, filesystem, and network of each container instance via
hostmetrics. - Container metrics: CPU, memory, network, and block I/O of every container via
docker_stats, with its ECS cluster, task, and task family as resource attributes. - Container logs: the stdout and stderr of containers that use the
json-filelog driver, viafilelog. Containers set up as Collect Container Logs shows carry their task family asservice.name. - Host logs: the ECS agent logs, and the container instance's system logs in
/var/log/messagesand/var/log/secure, viafilelog/host. Amazon Linux 2023 writes its system logs to the systemd journal instead, so on it only the ECS agent logs are collected by default. - OTLP: traces, metrics, and logs from your applications over OTLP/gRPC (4317) and OTLP/HTTP (4318).
- Resource attributes: host and cloud resource attributes via the
resourcedetectionprocessor.
Known Limitations
- Containers that log to CloudWatch Logs or FireLens: their logs leave the instance, so they are not collected. Use the
json-filelog driver, or send logs over OTLP. - No task attributes on application data: telemetry your applications send over OTLP carries no ECS task attributes unless the application's SDK adds them.
- EC2 and external instances only: Fargate does not run daemon services, so Fargate tasks in the same cluster are not collected. Add the ECS Serverless Collection Agent to their task definitions.
