Amazon ECS adds free LiveTaskCount metric, stops charging for RunningTaskCount
Victoria Shinder2 min readAmazon Web Services announced two changes to how Amazon Elastic Container Service reports task counts on 13 October 2026: a new metric, and a price cut on an existing one.
The new metric. LiveTaskCount is an ECS service metric that reports how many tasks in a service are actively running, and it counts more states than its older counterpart. AWS lists them: tasks whose desired state is ACTIVATING, RUNNING or DEACTIVATING, which includes tasks still running while they transition towards a stop — the announcement's own example is tasks draining connections during a scale-in. LiveTaskCount is part of the ECS service utilization metrics, carries no additional charge and does not require opting in to CloudWatch Container Insights.
The old metric, now free. RunningTaskCount in CloudWatch Container Insights stays as it is functionally: it counts tasks whose current and desired state are both RUNNING. What changes is the bill. It is now available at no additional charge to all Container Insights users, and AWS says the pricing change takes effect from 1 October 2026, applies automatically and needs no action.
Why the difference matters. AWS positions the two metrics for different jobs. Because LiveTaskCount includes tasks that are winding down but still serving, the announcement describes it as suited to autoscaling policies and capacity planning, where a scaling decision should see every task that is still producing load or metrics. RunningTaskCount, which ignores tasks in transition, is described as a health and stability signal for customers who already depend on it. In other words, a scale-in that is still draining connections will show a gap between the two numbers, and that gap is by design rather than a fault.
Where it applies. Both changes are available in all AWS Regions where Amazon ECS is available. AWS points to its ECS CloudWatch metrics and Container Insights metrics documentation for the metric definitions, and to the CloudWatch pricing page for a worked pricing example.
For teams that have been paying for Container Insights mainly to get a task count into a dashboard or alarm, the practical question is whether LiveTaskCount covers that need on its own; if it does, the Container Insights subscription has to justify itself on the other metrics it provides.
Source: AWS What's New, "Amazon ECS adds LiveTaskCount and removes the charge for RunningTaskCount metric" — https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/10/ecs-service-metrics/