Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights launches enhanced observability for Amazon EKS
Tags: aws, eks, observability, containers
Published: 2023-11-07 07:05:38

Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights now delivers enhanced observability for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) with out-of-the-box detailed health and performance metrics, including container level EKS performance metrics, Kube-state metrics and EKS control plane metrics for faster problem isolation and troubleshooting.


You can get started with Container Insights by installing the CloudWatch observability add-on in your clusters after they are created using the add-ons tab in your cluster info view. Container Insights now delivers overall container health and performance visibility via a landing page where you can navigate to the performance dashboards view for detailed analysis by navigating to View performance dashboards link on the top right.

###Setting up Container Insights on Amazon EKS and Kubernetes
Container Insights is supported on Amazon EKS versions 1.23 and later. The quick start method of installation is supported only on versions 1.24 and later.

The overall process for setting up Container Insights on Amazon EKS or Kubernetes is as follows:

1. Verify that you have the necessary prerequisites.

2. Set up the Amazon CloudWatch Observability EKS add-on, the CloudWatch agent, or AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry on your cluster to send metrics to CloudWatch.

>  Note
To use Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon EKS, you must use the Amazon CloudWatch Observability EKS add-on or the CloudWatch agent. For more information about this version of Container Insights, see Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon EKS.
To use Container Insights with Fargate, you must use AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry.

Set up Fluent Bit or Fluentd to send logs to CloudWatch Logs. (This is enabled by default if you install the Amazon CloudWatch Observability EKS add-on.)

You can perform these steps at once as part of the quick start setup if you are using the CloudWatch agent, or do them separately.
3. (Optional) Set up Amazon EKS control plane logging.

4. (Optional) Set up the CloudWatch agent as a StatsD endpoint on the cluster to send StatsD metrics to CloudWatch.

5. (Optional) Enable App Mesh Envoy Access Logs.


### Viewing Container Insights metrics
After you have Container Insights set up and it is collecting metrics, you can view those metrics in the CloudWatch console.

For Container Insights metrics to appear on your dashboard, you must complete the Container Insights setup. For more information, see Setting up Container Insights.

This procedure explains how to view the metrics that Container Insights automatically generates from the collected log data. The rest of this section explains how to further dive into your data and use CloudWatch Logs Insights to see more metrics at more levels of granularity.

####To view Container Insights metrics
1. Open the CloudWatch console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Insights, Container Insights.

3. In the drop-down box under Container Insights, choose Performance monitoring.

4. Use the drop-down boxes near the top to select the type of resource to view, as well as the specific resource.




Container Insights is available in all public AWS Regions, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, China (Beijing, operated by Sinnet), and China (Ningxia, operated by NWCD). Container Insights with enhanced observability for EKS comes with a new observation-based pricing – see [pricing page](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/pricing/) for details. For further information, visit the [Container Insights documentation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/ContainerInsights.html).

Reference -
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/11/amazon-cloudwatch-container-insights-enhanced-observability-eks/ 
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/ContainerInsights.html 
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/Container-Insights-view-metrics.html