Monitoring ECS EC2 using Opentelemetry Collection Agents

This guide explains how to monitor Amazon ECS on EC2 using OpenTelemetry and SigNoz. You'll deploy an OpenTelemetry Collector as a daemon service on each EC2 host to collect infrastructure metrics, container logs, and application telemetry.

What is ECS EC2 Monitoring with OpenTelemetry?

With the EC2 launch type, your tasks run on EC2 instances that you manage. Running the OpenTelemetry Collector as a daemon on each host enables:

Host and container metrics collection
Container log tailing and processing
Receiving OTLP telemetry from your applications
Forwarding telemetry to SigNoz for analysis and dashboards

Learn the concepts in the ECS EC2 - Overview.

Prerequisites

SigNoz backend (SigNoz Cloud or self-hosted)
ECS cluster using EC2 launch type
AWS CLI with appropriate permissions
Ability to deploy CloudFormation stacks and set SSM Parameter Store values

How It Works

Deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector as a daemon service (one per EC2 host)
Configure the collector to collect host/container data and receive app OTLP
Point your instrumented applications to the daemon service OTLP endpoint
Data is enriched and sent to SigNoz

Step 1: Install the Daemon Service

Use the CloudFormation-based setup to deploy the collector as a daemon across your EC2 hosts.

Follow ECS EC2 - Install

Step 2: Configure the Collector and Applications

Tune the collector configuration (receivers, processors, exporters)
Set app OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT to the daemon service
Add OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES with service.name=<your-service>
Follow ECS EC2 - Configure

What Data Can You Collect?

Host metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network)
ECS container/task metrics (awsecscontainermetrics)
Container and application logs (filelog)
Application traces and custom metrics (OTLP)

Visualize in SigNoz

Build dashboards for cluster and service-level views
Filter by cluster/service/task attributes
Investigate traces and logs for faster troubleshooting