Container restart failures require detailed observability into pod-level, node-level, and container-level metrics and logs. CloudWatch Container Insights is purpose-built for Kubernetes operational diagnostics and provides granular visibility into CPU, memory, network I/O, disk I/O, container restarts, OOM kills, throttling, pod lifecycle issues, and Kubernetes control plane behaviors.
The CloudWatch Observability add-on deploys Fluent Bit and the CloudWatch Agent directly into the EKS cluster as DaemonSets. These components automatically collect:
Container logs
Pod metrics
Node metrics
Cluster events
OOM errors
CrashLoopBackOff restart cycles
Control plane request anomalies
With this data, the DevOps engineer can easily identify misconfigurations, resource bottlenecks, unhealthy nodes, failing containers, or image pull issues.
Option A (dashboards only) lacks per-container diagnostic data.
Option B (CloudTrail) only logs API calls — not useful for restart debugging.
Option C (CloudTrail Insights) only detects anomalous API usage, not container failures.
Therefore, CloudWatch Container Insights is the correct and AWS-recommended solution for diagnosing container restart failures in EKS.
