Amazon ECS now publishes container health status as a CloudWatch metric

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now publishes container health status as a new metric in CloudWatch Container Insights with enhanced observability. Customers can now track the operational health of their containers through a dedicated CloudWatch metric and create alarms to respond proactively to unhealthy containers.

When customers configure a container health check in the container definition of an ECS task definition, Container Insights now publishes the UnHealthyContainerHealthStatus metric in the ECS/ContainerInsights namespace. The metric reports 0 for HEALTHY and 1 for UNHEALTHY. Container health state information is also available in embedded metric format (EMF) logs, providing additional context while health checks are being evaluated during the UNKNOWN state. The metric is available across cluster, service, task, and container-level dimensions, enabling customers to monitor health at their preferred level of granularity. Customers can create CloudWatch alarms on the metric to receive notifications when containers become unhealthy, allowing teams to take immediate action and maintain application reliability.

To get started, enable Container Insights with enhanced observability on your ECS cluster and configure a container health check in your task definition to start collecting the metric in CloudWatch. Container health metric is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon ECS Container Insights is supported. For more information, see the Amazon ECS container health checks documentation and the CloudWatch Container Insights documentation.