Datadog Agent for AWS ECS Clusters for Events

The Datadog Agent on Amazon ECS can be configured to collect events from your containers and infrastructure. Events capture state changes, deployments, and other significant occurrences in your ECS environment, providing context that complements your metric and log data. This guide covers the configuration steps needed to enable event collection.

Create an IAM Role for ECS Tasks

Create an IAM role for the ECS tasks, so they can send data to Kloudfuse and interact with AWS services.

You can use the following policy to allow Datadog Agent to collect metrics, logs, and traces.

Navigate to IAM in the AWS Console, and create a new Role with the following specifications:

Trusted entity

ECS (Elastic Container Service)

Policy

Custom, or use AWS-managed policies:

  • AmazonEC2ContainerServiceforEC2Role, for ECS task communication

  • CloudWatchFullAccess, for metrics

  • AWSXRayDaemonWriteAccess, for tracing

  • logs policy, for CloudWatch logs access

Install Datadog Agent on ECS

Datadog provides a Docker image that runs as an agent inside the ECS containers. To use this image, configure ECS Task Definitions.

  1. Create an ECS Task Definition with Datadog Agent.

    Modify your ECS service’s task definition to run the Datadog agent as a sidecar container.

    {
"containerDefinitions": [
{
    "name": "datadog-agent",
    "image": "public.ecr.aws/datadog/agent:latest",
    "cpu": 100,
    "memory": 512,
    "essential": true,
    "environment": [
        {
            "name": "DD_LOGS_ENABLED",
            "value": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "DD_API_KEY",
            "value": "kloudfuse"
        },
        {
            "name": "DD_URL",
            "value": "https://<kf-domain-name>/ingester"
        },
        {
            "name": "DD_LOGS_CONFIG_CONTAINER_COLLECT_ALL",
            "value": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "DD_LOGS_CONFIG_FORCE_USE_HTTP",
            "value": "true"
        },
        {
            "name": "DD_LOGS_CONFIG_LOGS_DD_URL",
            "value": "<kf-domain-name>:443"
        },
    ],
    "mountPoints": [
        {
            "sourceVolume": "docker_sock",
            "containerPath": "/var/run/docker.sock"
        },
        {
            "sourceVolume": "cgroup",
            "containerPath": "/host/sys/fs/cgroup"
        },
        {
            "sourceVolume": "proc",
            "containerPath": "/host/proc"
        },
        {
            "sourceVolume": "pointdir",
            "containerPath": "/opt/datadog-agent/run",
            "readOnly": false
        },
        {
            "sourceVolume": "containers_root",
            "containerPath": "/var/lib/docker/containers",
            "readOnly": true
        }
    ],
    "linuxParameters": {
        "initProcessEnabled": true
    },
}
],
"family": "datadog-agent-task",
"taskRoleArn": "arn:aws:iam::<aws-account-id>:role/<custom-ecs-iam-role>",
"executionRoleArn": "arn:aws:iam::<aws-account-id>:role/<custom-ecs-iam-role>",
"placementConstraints": [],
"compatibilities": [
"EXTERNAL",
"EC2"
],
"tags": []
}
    code

Collect Events

Add the necessary tracing libraries to your application, such as ddtrace for Python or Node.js, and configure it to send events to the Datadog agent.

The ECS Agent collects events with minimal configuration.