AWS ECS

StackState Self-hosted v5.1.x

Overview

Get topology and telemetry information from an Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) cluster.

AWS ECS is a StackState core integration.

Functionality

StackState Agent V3 provides the following functionality:

• Reporting hosts, processes, and containers

• Reporting all network connections between processes / containers including network traffic telemetry

• Telemetry for hosts, processes, and containers

• Trace Agent support

Setup

Installation

To monitor your ECS containers and tasks run the Agent as a container on every EC2 instance in your ECS cluster.

Download the manifest from the StackState UI page StackPacks > AWS ECS and edit it providing the configuration parameters provided there.

Once the manifest is ready, the Agent task can be registered with the following command:

aws ecs register-task-definition --cli-input-json file://path/to/stackstate-agent-v2-ecs.json

The Agent should be loaded on one container on each EC2 instance. The way to achieve this is to run Agent as a Daemon Service (docs.aws.amazon.com).

Schedule a Daemon Service in AWS using StackState Agent V3 ECS Task:

1. Log in to the AWS console and navigate to the ECS Clusters section. Select the cluster you run the Agent on.

2. Create a new service by clicking the Create button under Services.

3. For launch type, select EC2 then the task definition created previously.

4. For service type, select DAEMON, and enter a Service name. Click Next.

5. Since the Service runs once on each instance, you won’t need a load balancer. Select None. Click Next.

6. Daemon services don’t need Auto Scaling, so click Next Step and then Create Service.

Integrate with Java traces

When used in conjunction with one of our language specific trace clients to allow automatic merging of components within StackState make sure to configure you app to use the host’s pid namespace:

  "containerDefinitions": [
    {
      ...
      "pidMode": "host", # ensure pid's match with processes reported by the StackState process agent
      ...

For example, using the StackState Java Trace Client.

Advanced Agent configurations

The Agent can be configured to tune the process blacklist, or turn off specific features when not needed. For details, see advanced Agent configuration.