Monitoring ECS EC2 using OpenTelemetry Collection Agents

This guide explains how to monitor Amazon ECS on EC2 using OpenTelemetry and SigNoz. You'll install the ECS EC2 Collection Agent with Foundry, which runs an OpenTelemetry Collector as a daemon service on each container instance to collect host metrics, container metrics, 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 instance enables:

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

Learn the concepts in the ECS EC2 - Overview.

Prerequisites

A SigNoz backend (SigNoz Cloud or self-hosted) to receive OpenTelemetry data
An ECS cluster with EC2 container instances, or external instances registered through ECS Anywhere
Terraform 1.4 or newer and the AWS CLI, with AWS credentials that can create the collector's resources

How It Works

For where the collector runs and what it collects, see How it works in the overview.

Step 1: Install the Collection Agent

Install the collector as a daemon service across your container instances with Foundry and Terraform.

Follow ECS EC2 - Install

Step 2: Configure the Collector and Applications

Tune the collector configuration (receivers, processors, exporters) in casting.yaml
Set the application's OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT to the collector on its instance
Set OTEL_SERVICE_NAME to your service's name
Follow ECS EC2 - Configure

Visualize in SigNoz

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