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How do people view and interact with terminal logs generated by AWS ECS?

I've been using the ECS task view so far, but I feel the UX is bad and the Cloudwatch UI has similar problems.

How do others read and interact with their logs?

Kurru
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  • I'm not sure what you mean. Typically you push logs to cloudwatch logs. – Tim Dec 23 '21 at 22:53
  • I'm having a hard time interacting with these logs in cloudwatch insights. Like, if I do a filter to find a message, it's then difficult to jump to that specific log file to read neighboring logs. Or if I want to extra fields from my logs, such as thread name, then i have to add that to the query builder every time. I'm running a java server, but i dont know if there are better configuration options that I'm just not aware of that add more value or ease of use to my CloudWatch experience. – Kurru Dec 27 '21 at 21:56
  • Another example, paginating logs is difficult as this requires changing the pagination query, not a simple 'next button' – Kurru Dec 27 '21 at 22:24
  • Cloudwatch log insights isn't always the easiest tool to use. It is possible to download entire log streams and view them locally on your computer, but I don't have the command available right now. Google will find it. It is also possible to have external tools pull logs from cloud watch logs that have a nicer interface. – Tim Dec 28 '21 at 03:40
  • Whats your personal preference? Do you use an external tool or view these locally? I could see locally getting cumbersome when looking at lots of logs over a few days – Kurru Dec 28 '21 at 20:52
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    I use CW Logs / Insights personally but it's pretty clunky and I need something better, but I work on many customer accounts which makes it more difficult. I know a managed services team that uses data dog, but haven't used it myself – Tim Dec 29 '21 at 00:12

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You could look into using AWS OpenSearch (aka ElasticSearch), and adding the beats agents to your containers. That would let you use Kibana for browsing the logs, which is generally a popular tool.

This does come at extra cost! If you are dead against using CloudWatch then setting up a centralized logging account in your AWS org and sharing the cost of an OpenSearch cluster is probably the next best option.

shearn89
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