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ECS-Fargate

Splunk APM Trace Generator Demo For AWS ECS Fargate

This repo demonstrates reference implemenations for a single AWS ECS Fargate task example of Splunk APM that will send spans to a sidecar OpenTelemetry container.

ECS works very simply: just add the environment variables required by the Otel APM Instrumentation and the Instrumentation will do the rest.

To deploy this example, you must have an ECS environment ready to go with VPC, task roles for logs, etc. Instructions are below:

Setup

Configure ECS CLI Profile:

ecs-cli \
configure profile \
--access-key YOURAWSKEYHERE \
--secret-key YOURAWSSECRETKEYHERE \
--profile-name ecs-ec2-profile

Configure ECS Cluster:

configure ECS Cluster Config:
ecs-cli configure \
--cluster test-cluster \
--config-name test-cluster \
--region YOURREGIONHEREi.e.:us-east-1

Create ECS Cluster: 

aws ecs create-cluster --cluster-name test-cluster

Deploy Task

The task spins up two ECS Fargate containers:

  • splunk-otel-collector - sidecar to observe ECS host metrics and relay application traces to Splunk APM
  • tracegen-fargate - generates traces using a manually instrumented Java app and sends them to the Otel Collector

Deploy with the following commands- you must change the variables in caps in tracegen-java-otel-fargate-otelcolfargate.json to suit your environment:

Create cluster 

aws ecs create-cluster --cluster-name test-cluster

Note that the task definition will increment each time you try it- from 1 to 2 etc. To check which version is current use:

aws ecs list-task-definitions

Identify your Security Group and Subnet and change them in the deploy script below and then deploy trace generator / otelcollector task to cluster:

aws ecs create-service \
--cluster test-cluster \
--service-name tracegen-fargate \
--desired-count 1 \
--launch-type "FARGATE" \
--network-configuration "awsvpcConfiguration={subnets=[subnet-YOURSUBNETHERE],securityGroups=[sg-YOURSECURITYGROUPHERE],assignPublicIp=ENABLED}" \
--task-definition tracegen-java-otel-fargate-otelcol:1

After a few seconds check Splunk APM and Dashboards->ECS-Fargate to see the trace generator service and Otel collector

Cleanup

aws ecs delete-service --cluster test-cluster --service tracegen-java-otel-fargate-otelcol --force

Extras

The ecs-cli-commands.md file offers helpful commands for ECS Fargate management for the AWS CLI.

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