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New feature

Amazon ECS adds LiveTaskCount and removes the charge for RunningTaskCount metric

Amazon ECS introduces LiveTaskCount, a new service metric reporting actively running tasks, available at no cost. RunningTaskCount metric in CloudWatch Container Insights is now free for all users.

Today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) introduced a new service metric, LiveTaskCount, reporting the number of actively running tasks. This metric is provided at no additional cost to all customers. Additionally, the existing RunningTaskCount metric from Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights is now free. LiveTaskCount reports tasks in ACTIVATING, RUNNING, and DEACTIVATING desired states, including those transitioning to stopped during connection draining, making it suitable for autoscaling policies and capacity planning. It is offered free as part of ECS service usage metrics and does not require opting into CloudWatch Container Insights. The existing RunningTaskCount metric continues to track tasks where both current and desired states are RUNNING, serving as a health and stability signal. With today's update, RunningTaskCount is now available at no cost to all CloudWatch Container Insights users. These updates are available in all AWS regions where Amazon ECS is offered. No action is required, and the change to RunningTaskCount pricing will take effect on October 1, 2026, applying automatically. For more information, see the ECS CloudWatch metrics and ECS Container Insights metrics pages. For pricing examples, refer to the Amazon CloudWatch pricing page.

Why it matters

Amazon ECS is an AWS service for managing and deploying containerized applications. This update helps users monitor task status more accurately and optimize autoscaling and capacity planning.

Regions: Same as Amazon ECS

Read the original AWS announcement

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