# Amazon ECS Managed Daemons can now collect json-file logs from application containers on ECS Managed Instances

Hi, it's Shiichan! Here's an ops-friendly feature that tidies up log collection on ECS.

## What was announced?

AWS What's New says Amazon ECS introduces two things:

- json-file log driver support for Amazon ECS Managed Instances
- Log driver volumes for Amazon ECS Managed Daemons

Together, these let you collect application logs with the observability agent of your choice and forward them to any destination you choose.

## What changes

Application containers on ECS Managed Instances can write their logs as local files in standard Docker json-file format, which most observability agents read natively.

Managed daemons can read these files directly through a volume mount, without specifying host bind mount paths or requiring root privileges. As a result, one managed daemon on each instance can collect logs from every application container that uses the json-file log driver.

## Dive Deep

ECS keeps each container's logs in a dedicated directory named with the container ID and retains them until the container is removed. So your managed daemon can use native file-based log collection and trace every log back to the container that produced it.

The setup steps:

- Set the log driver to `json-file` in the `logConfiguration` of your application task definition
- Register a daemon task definition that specifies a volume with `logDriverVolumeConfiguration`
- Mount that volume into your daemon container using `mountPoints`

You can configure this using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, API, AWS SDKs or AWS CloudFormation.

The announcement text I had was cut off before the list of supported Regions, so check the official announcement page for availability.

## Wrap-up

- The json-file log driver is supported on ECS Managed Instances
- Managed Daemons can read log files directly through log driver volumes
- No host bind mounts or root privileges, and one daemon per instance covers every container
- Logs live in container-ID directories and are retained until the container is removed

This is for platform and SRE folks who want to use their favorite observability agent on ECS!