Tracing ECS Applications

Setup

After following the Amazon ECS agent installation instructions, enable trace collection per the instructions below.

Set the following parameters in the task definition for the datadog/agent container. Set the portMappings host / container port to 8126 with protocol tcp:

    containerDefinitions": [
    {
      "name": "datadog-agent",
      "image": "datadog/agent:latest",
      "cpu": 10,
      "memory": 256,
      "essential": true,
      "portMappings": [
        {
          "hostPort": 8126,
          "protocol": "tcp",
          "containerPort": 8126
        }
      ],
      ...
    

For Agent v7.17 or lower, add the following environment variables:

    ...
          "environment": [
            ...
          {
            "name": "DD_APM_ENABLED",
            "value": "true"
          },
          {
            "name": "DD_APM_NON_LOCAL_TRAFFIC",
            "value": "true"
          },
          ...
          ]
    ...
    

See all environment variables available for Agent trace collection.

Assign the private IP address for each underlying instance your containers are running in your application container to the DD_AGENT_HOST environment variable. This allows your application traces to be shipped to the Agent. The Amazon’s EC2 metadata endpoint allows discovery of the private IP address. To get the private IP address for each host, curl the following URL:
```
    curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4
    
```
Set the result as your Trace Agent hostname environment variable for each application container shipping to APM:
```
    os.environ['DD_AGENT_HOST'] = <EC2_PRIVATE_IP>
    
```

Launch time variables

In cases where variables on your ECS application are set at launch time, you must set the hostname as an environment variable with DD_AGENT_HOST. Otherwise, you can set the hostname in your application’s source code for Python, Javascript, or Ruby. For Java and .NET, you can set the hostname in the ECS task. For example:

Dropdown

import requests
from ddtrace import tracer


def get_aws_ip():
  r = requests.get('http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4')
  return r.text

tracer.configure(hostname=get_aws_ip())

For more examples of setting the Agent hostname in other languages, refer to the change agent hostname documentation.

const tracer = require('dd-trace');
const request = require('request');

request('http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4', function(
    error,
    resp,
    body
) {
    tracer.init({ hostname: body });
});

For more examples of setting the Agent hostname in other languages, refer to the change agent hostname documentation.

require 'ddtrace'
require 'net/http'

Datadog.configure do |c|
  c.tracer hostname: Net::HTTP.get(URI('http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4'))
end

package main

import (
    "net/http"
    "io/ioutil"
    "gopkg.in/DataDog/dd-trace-go.v1/ddtrace/tracer"
)

resp, err := http.Get("http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4")
        bodyBytes, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)
        host := string(bodyBytes)
  if err == nil {
        //set the output of the curl command to the DD_Agent_host env
        os.Setenv("DD_AGENT_HOST", host)
        // tell the trace agent the host setting
        tracer.Start(tracer.WithAgentAddr(host))
        defer tracer.Stop()

Copy this script into the entryPoint field of your ECS task definition, updating the values with your application jar and argument flags.

"entryPoint": [
  "sh",
  "-c",
  "export DD_AGENT_HOST=$(curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4); java -javaagent:/app/dd-java-agent.jar <APPLICATION_ARG_FLAGS> -jar <APPLICATION_JAR_FILE/WAR_FILE>"
]

For more examples of setting the Agent hostname in other languages, refer to the change agent hostname documentation.

"entryPoint": [
  "sh",
  "-c",
  "export DD_AGENT_HOST=$(curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4); dotnet ${APP_PATH}"
]

Datadog Docs

Tracing ECS Applications

Setup

Launch time variables

Further reading