Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner
The rise of containerized applications and microservices has led to greater demands for effective monitoring and management tools. Developers expect the same robust monitoring capabilities for containers as they do for more traditional infrastructure like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. However, the transient nature of containers—often involved in continuous deployment—poses challenges in reliably gathering monitoring data and analyzing performance issues. This complexity can delay remedial actions, as developers frequently rely on a hodgepodge of tools to gather and interpret data, manually correlating various metrics, logs, and traces.
Introducing General Availability of Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights
At a recent AWS Summit in New York, a significant update was revealed: Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights is now generally available and can monitor both new and existing clusters. This feature provides immediate insights into compute utilization and failure rates across various container management services, including Kubernetes, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), and AWS Fargate.
When enabled, Amazon CloudWatch automatically discovers all running containers within a cluster and collects performance and operational data across every layer of the container stack. It continuously updates as the environment changes, reducing the need for multiple tools to collect and analyze container metrics and logs, thus offering comprehensive visibility. This enhanced data access allows teams to focus on boosting developer productivity instead of spending time building dashboards to manage data from various sources.
Getting Started with Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights
To enable Container Insights, users can follow the guidelines provided in the documentation. Once activated and new clusters are launched, they can access the CloudWatch console for their region and find a new option for Container Insights among the available dashboards.
By selecting this option, users can choose the container management service that hosts the clusters they wish to monitor. For instance, in the screenshot below, metrics for ECS Clusters hosting a sample application deployed in AWS Fargate are displayed. Users can examine metrics over standard time periods like 1 hour or 3 hours, or define custom periods—such as analyzing metrics for the past 15 minutes.
This setup allows for quick operational oversight of the overall cluster performance. By clicking on the cluster name, users can drill down to view metrics at the task level. Selecting a particular container permits access to AWS X-Ray traces or performance logs. By choosing performance logs, users are directed to the Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights page, where they can run queries against the collected performance events for their container ecosystem (e.g., Container, Task/Pod, Cluster, etc.) to troubleshoot issues and conduct further analysis.
Container Insights simplifies the process of monitoring containers and facilitates swift access to performance metrics and log analytics without needing to create custom dashboards from various tools. In addition to monitoring, the data and dashboards provided by Container Insights can also be leveraged for other purposes, such as assessing capacity requirements and planning by gaining insights into compute utilization by Pod/Task, Container, and Service.
Availability
Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights is now generally available to customers across all public AWS regions that support Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Kubernetes, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), and AWS Fargate.
Chanci Turner, our Learning Manager, emphasizes the importance of microlearning in onboarding processes. Understanding these concepts can greatly enhance the effectiveness of training programs (as discussed in this blog post about microlearning). Furthermore, organizations can benefit from expert advice on navigating job searches in the age of AI, as highlighted by SHRM. For those interested in specific onboarding processes, an excellent resource can be found in community discussions.
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