Setting up AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry Collector in Amazon Elastic Container Service

In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to run AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry Collector (ADOT Collector) as a sidecar on the Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) in Fargate and in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) mode. We provide a sample application within the same Amazon ECS task to send monitoring data to AWS OTel Collector.

1. Create a Cluster

If you don't have a cluster, follow this tutorial to create a new one.

2. Setup the ADOT Collector for Xray, StatsD and ECS Container metrics

There are three different ways to get started by installing ADOT Collector as a sidecar in ECS- using CloudFormation template, using Task Definition, and using AWS Management Console. Follow any of the following three options to setup the collector.

2.1 Setup using CloudFormation template

The CloudFormation template will create all the necessary resources to get the Collector ready. This option is recommended for the beginners who are new to ECS.

• Deploy ADOT for ECS on EC2
• Deploy ADOT for ECS on Fargate

2.2 Setup using ECS Task Definition

This option is recommended for developers who are familier with ECS and know how to run a task using a given task definition.

• Create IAM Policy
• Create IAM Role
• Create Task Definition
  • Create task definition for ECS on EC2
  • Create task definition for ECS on Fargate
• Deploy Task

2.3 Setup using AWS Management Console

This option shows the whole process step by step to setup ADOT Collector using AWS Management Console.

• Create IAM Policy
• Create IAM Role
• Create Task Definition using AWS Console
• Run Task

3. Setup the ADOT Collector for ECS EC2 instance Metrics

There are three different ways to get started by installing ADOT as a daemon service in ECS - using CloudFormation template, using Task Definition, and using AWS Management Console. Follow any of the following three options to setup the collector.

3.1 Setup using CloudFormation template

The CloudFormation template will create all the necessary resources to get the Collector ready. This option is recommended for the beginners who are new to ECS.

• Deploy ADOT for ECS EC2 instance metrics

3.2 Setup using ECS Task Definition

This option is recommended for developers who are familier with ECS and know how to run a task using a given task definition.

• Create IAM Policy
• Create IAM Role
• Create Task Definition
• Deploy Task as a daemon service

3.3 Setup using AWS Management Console

This option shows the whole process step by step to setup ADOT Collector using AWS Management Console.

• Create IAM Policy
• Create IAM Role
• Create Task Definition using AWS Console
• Deploy task as a daemon service

4. Results

• See container metrics in CloudWatch
• See traces in AWS X-Ray
• See StatsD metrics in CloudWatch
• See instance metrics in CloudWatch

5. Custom OpenTelemetry Configuration

6. Reference

• Getting Started with AWS ECS Container Metrics Receiver
• Getting Started with AWS X-Ray Receiver

Note: After you finished the tutorial, remember to shut down the new ECS cluster created in the tutorial in order to avoid any charges.