Amazon EKS Telemetry

Choose the right ingestion path for pod logs, kubelet metrics, control plane logs, and traces from Amazon EKS — an ADOT DaemonSet or Fargate sidecar.

Amazon EKS workloads emit pod logs and application telemetry, while the kubelet exposes node, pod, container, and volume metrics. Control-plane logs are written to CloudWatch by AWS.

Recommended method

ADOT — deploy the Collector as a DaemonSet on EC2 node groups to collect pod logs, kubelet metrics, and application telemetry. On Fargate, use a per-pod sidecar because DaemonSets cannot run there. See Kubernetes logs and metrics for the kubelet preset and RBAC requirements.

Alternatives

• Fluent Bit on EKS — DaemonSet that collects container logs from every node; lighter than a full collector.
• Self-Managed OTel Collector — full control over the OpenTelemetry pipeline when ADOT’s distribution doesn’t fit.
• CloudWatch Log Forwarder — required path for EKS control plane logs, which are CloudWatch-only.

See Ingesting AWS Data into Bronto for the full service-to-method mapping.

References

• Amazon EKS — control plane logs