AWS ECS Monitor

Production health monitoring and log analysis for AWS ECS services.

What It Does

• Health Checks: HTTP probes against your domain, ECS service status (desired vs running), ALB target group health, SSL certificate expiry
• Log Analysis: Pulls CloudWatch logs, categorizes errors (panics, fatals, OOM, timeouts, 5xx), detects container restarts, filters health check noise
• Auto-Diagnosis: Reads health status and automatically investigates failing services via log analysis

Prerequisites

• aws CLI configured with appropriate IAM permissions:
  • ecs:ListServices, ecs:DescribeServices
  • elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTargetGroups, elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTargetHealth
  • logs:FilterLogEvents, logs:DescribeLogGroups
• curl for HTTP health checks
• python3 for JSON processing and log analysis
• openssl for SSL certificate checks (optional)

Configuration

All configuration is via environment variables:

Variable	Required	Default	Description
ECS_CLUSTER	Yes	—	ECS cluster name
ECS_REGION	No	us-east-1	AWS region
ECS_DOMAIN	No	—	Domain for HTTP/SSL checks (skip if unset)
ECS_SERVICES	No	auto-detect	Comma-separated service names to monitor
ECS_HEALTH_STATE	No	./data/ecs-health.json	Path to write health state JSON
ECS_HEALTH_OUTDIR	No	./data/	Output directory for logs and alerts
ECS_LOG_PATTERN	No	/ecs/{service}	CloudWatch log group pattern ({service} is replaced)
ECS_HTTP_ENDPOINTS	No	—	Comma-separated name=url pairs for HTTP probes

Directories Written

• ECS_HEALTH_STATE (default: ./data/ecs-health.json) — Health state JSON file
• ECS_HEALTH_OUTDIR (default: ./data/) — Output directory for logs, alerts, and analysis reports

Scripts

scripts/ecs-health.sh — Health Monitor

# Full check
ECS_CLUSTER=my-cluster ECS_DOMAIN=example.com ./scripts/ecs-health.sh

# JSON output only
ECS_CLUSTER=my-cluster ./scripts/ecs-health.sh --json

# Quiet mode (no alerts, just status file)
ECS_CLUSTER=my-cluster ./scripts/ecs-health.sh --quiet

Exit codes: 0 = healthy, 1 = unhealthy/degraded, 2 = script error

scripts/cloudwatch-logs.sh — Log Analyzer

# Pull raw logs from a service
ECS_CLUSTER=my-cluster ./scripts/cloudwatch-logs.sh pull my-api --minutes 30

# Show errors across all services
ECS_CLUSTER=my-cluster ./scripts/cloudwatch-logs.sh errors all --minutes 120

# Deep analysis with error categorization
ECS_CLUSTER=my-cluster ./scripts/cloudwatch-logs.sh diagnose --minutes 60

# Detect container restarts
ECS_CLUSTER=my-cluster ./scripts/cloudwatch-logs.sh restarts my-api

# Auto-diagnose from health state file
ECS_CLUSTER=my-cluster ./scripts/cloudwatch-logs.sh auto-diagnose

# Summary across all services
ECS_CLUSTER=my-cluster ./scripts/cloudwatch-logs.sh summary --minutes 120

Options: --minutes N (default: 60), --json, --limit N (default: 200), --verbose

Auto-Detection

When ECS_SERVICES is not set, both scripts auto-detect services from the cluster:

aws ecs list-services --cluster $ECS_CLUSTER

Log groups are resolved by pattern (default /ecs/{service}). Override with ECS_LOG_PATTERN:

# If your log groups are /ecs/prod/my-api, /ecs/prod/my-frontend, etc.
ECS_LOG_PATTERN="/ecs/prod/{service}" ECS_CLUSTER=my-cluster ./scripts/cloudwatch-logs.sh diagnose

Integration

The health monitor can trigger the log analyzer for auto-diagnosis when issues are detected. Set ECS_HEALTH_OUTDIR to a shared directory and run both scripts together:

export ECS_CLUSTER=my-cluster
export ECS_DOMAIN=example.com
export ECS_HEALTH_OUTDIR=./data

# Run health check (auto-triggers log analysis on failure)
./scripts/ecs-health.sh

# Or run log analysis independently
./scripts/cloudwatch-logs.sh auto-diagnose --minutes 30

Error Categories

The log analyzer classifies errors into:

• panic — Go panics
• fatal — Fatal errors
• oom — Out of memory
• timeout — Connection/request timeouts
• connection_error — Connection refused/reset
• http_5xx — HTTP 500-level responses
• python_traceback — Python tracebacks
• exception — Generic exceptions
• auth_error — Permission/authorization failures
• structured_error — JSON-structured error logs
• error — Generic ERROR-level messages

Health check noise (GET/HEAD /health from ALB) is automatically filtered from error counts and HTTP status distribution.