Three Ways To Forward Logs From Amazon ECS To New Relic

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a managed service that allows users to deploy and manage containerized applications on AWS infrastructure, offering two launch types: Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate. While EC2 provides customizable infrastructure for container management, Fargate offers a fully managed environment with reduced overhead. The article discusses three methods for forwarding logs from ECS to New Relic Logs, depending on the chosen launch type: using an Infrastructure agent for EC2, deploying a sidecar container with the AWS FireLens plugin, or utilizing an AWS Lambda function with the CloudWatch plugin. Each method has its own setup requirements and limitations, such as the need for parsing data upstream in the CloudWatch method, but they all aim to enhance log visibility and management within ECS environments. The insights are provided by Mike Neville-O’Neill, a former Product Manager at New Relic, who emphasizes the importance of integrating these practices into the broader observability strategy for AWS environments.