Single Cluster AWS Native Observability - Auto Mode¶

Architecture¶

The following figure illustrates the architecture of the pattern we will be deploying for Single EKS Auto Mode Cluster Native Observability pattern using AWS native tools such as CloudWatch Logs and Container Insights.

Architecture

This example makes use of CloudWatch Container Insights as a vizualization and metric-aggregation layer. Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights helps customers collect, aggregate, and summarize metrics and logs from containerized applications and microservices. Metrics data is collected as performance log events using the embedded metric format. These performance log events use a structured JSON schema that enables high-cardinality data to be ingested and stored at scale. From this data, CloudWatch creates aggregated metrics at the cluster, node, pod, task, and service level as CloudWatch metrics. The metrics that Container Insights collects are available in CloudWatch automatic dashboards.

By combining Container Insights and CloudWatch logs, we are able to provide a foundation for EKS (Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service) Observability. Monitoring EKS for metrics has two categories: the control plane and the Amazon EKS nodes (with Kubernetes objects). The Amazon EKS control plane consists of control plane nodes that run the Kubernetes software, such as etcd and the Kubernetes API server. To read more on the components of an Amazon EKS cluster, please read the service documentation.

Objective¶

Deploys one production grade Amazon EKS Auto Mode cluster.
Enables Control Plane Logging.
AWS Distro For OpenTelemetry Operator and Collector
Logs with AWS for FluentBit and CloudWatch Logs
Enables CloudWatch Container Insights.
Installs Prometheus Node Exporter for infrastructure metrics.

Prerequisites¶

Ensure that you have installed the following tools on your machine.

Deploying¶

Clone your forked repository

git clone https://github.com/aws-observability/cdk-aws-observability-accelerator.git

Install the AWS CDK Toolkit globally on your machine using

npm install -g aws-cdk

Install project dependencies by running npm install in the main folder of this cloned repository
Once all pre-requisites are set you are ready to deploy the pipeline. Run the following command from the root of this repository to deploy the pipeline stack:

make build
make pattern single-new-eks-automode-awsnative-observability deploy

Verify the resources¶

Run update-kubeconfig command. You should be able to get the command from CDK output message.

aws eks update-kubeconfig --name single-new-eks-automode-awsnative-observability-accelerator --region <your region> --role-arn arn:aws:iam::xxxxxxxxx:role/single-new-eks-awsnative--singleneweksawsnativeauto-JN3QM2KMBNCO

Let’s verify the resources created by steps above.

kubectl get nodes -o wide

Output:

NAME                  STATUS   ROLES    AGE   VERSION               INTERNAL-IP   EXTERNAL-IP    OS-IMAGE                                                              KERNEL-VERSION   CONTAINER-RUNTIME
i-08431fdb27179b448   Ready    <none>   26m   v1.33.4-eks-e386d34   10.0.18.245   3.17.164.102   Bottlerocket (EKS Auto, Standard) 2025.11.8 (aws-k8s-1.33-standard)   6.12.53          containerd://1.7.28+bottlerocket

Next, lets verify the namespaces in the cluster:

kubectl get ns # Output shows all namespace

Output:

NAME                       STATUS   AGE
amazon-cloudwatch          Active   5h36m
cert-manager               Active   5h36m
default                    Active   5h46m
kube-node-lease            Active   5h46m
kube-public                Active   5h46m
kube-system                Active   5h46m
prometheus-node-exporter   Active   5h36m

Visualization¶

Navigate to CloudWatch and go to "Container Insights".

View the Container Map:

Container_Map

View the Performance Monitoring Dashboard:

Perf_Dashboard

Viewing Logs¶

Refer to "Using CloudWatch Logs Insights to Query Logs in Logging.

Enabling Application Signals for your services¶

Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals is a new integrated native APM experience in AWS. CloudWatch Application Signals supports Java, Python, .NET, and Node.js applications running on your Amazon EKS Auto Mode cluster.

If you haven't enabled Application Signals in this account yet, follow steps 1 - 4 in our AWS documentation.

Next, you have to update your Application to Configure application metrics and trace sampling. For this, you must add an annotation to a manifest YAML in your cluster. Adding this annotation auto-instruments the application to send metrics, traces, and logs to Application Signals. You have two options for the annotation:

Annotate Workload auto-instruments a single workload in the cluster.

Paste the below line into the PodTemplate section of the workload manifest.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      # add this annotation under the pod template metadata of the services deployment YAML you want to monitor
      annotations:
        instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/inject-java: "true"
        instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/inject-python: "true"
        instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/inject-dotnet: "true";
        instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/otel-dotnet-auto-runtime: "linux-x64" # for generic Linux glibc based images, this is default value and can be omitted
        instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/otel-dotnet-auto-runtime: "linux-musl-x64" # for Alpine Linux (linux-musl-x64) based images
        instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/inject-nodejs: "true"
...

In your terminal, enter kubectl apply -f your_deployment_yaml to apply the change.

Annotate Namespace auto-instruments all workloads deployed in the selected namespace.

Paste the below line into the metadata section of the namespace manifest.

annotations: instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/inject-java: "true"
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
    name: <your_namespace>
    # add this annotation under metadata of the namespace manifest you want to monitor
    annotations:
      instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/inject-java: "true"
      instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/inject-python: "true"
      instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/inject-dotnet: "true"
      instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/inject-nodejs: "true"
...

In your terminal, enter kubectl apply -f your_namespace_yaml to apply the change.
In your terminal, enter a command to restart all pods in the namespace. An example command to restart deployment workloads is kubectl rollout restart deployment -n namespace_name

Visualization of CloudWatch Application Signals data¶

After enabling your Application to pass metrics and traces by following the steps provided above, open your Amazon CloudWatch console in the same region as your EKS cluster, then from the left hand side choose Application Signals -> Services and you will see the metrics shown on the sample dashboard below:

APP_Signals_Services

APP_Signals_Dependencies

Teardown¶

You can teardown the whole CDK stack with the following command:

make pattern single-new-eks-automode-awsnative-observability destroy