AWS CloudTrail

Monitor user behavior and API utilization on AWS, as well as in hybrid and multicloud settings.

What is AWS CloudTrail?

AWS CloudTrail logs every AWS account activity, including resource access, changes, and timing. It monitors activity from the CLI, SDKs, APIs, and AWS Management Console.

CloudTrail can be used to:

Track Activity: Find out who was responsible for what in your AWS environment.

Boost security by identifying odd or unwanted activity.

Audit and Compliance: Maintain a record for regulatory requirements and audits.

Troubleshoot Issues: Examine logs to look into issues.

The logs are easily reviewed or analyzed later because CloudTrail saves them to an Amazon S3 bucket.

Why AWS CloudTrail?

Governance, compliance, operational audits, and auditing of your AWS account are all made possible by the service AWS CloudTrail.

Benefits

Aggregate and consolidate multisource events

You may use CloudTrail Lake to ingest activity events from AWS as well as sources outside of AWS, such as other cloud providers, in-house apps, and SaaS apps that are either on-premises or in the cloud.

Immutably store audit-worthy events

Audit-worthy events can be permanently stored in AWS CloudTrail Lake. Produce audit reports that are needed by external regulations and internal policies with ease.

Derive insights and analyze unusual activity

Use Amazon Athena or SQL-based searches to identify unwanted access and examine activity logs. For individuals who are not as skilled in creating SQL queries, natural language query generation enabled by generative AI makes this process much simpler. React with automated workflows and rules-based Event Bridge alerts.

Use cases

Compliance & auditing

Use CloudTrail logs to demonstrate compliance with SOC, PCI, and HIPAA rules and shield your company from fines.

Security

By logging user and API activity in your AWS accounts, you can strengthen your security posture. Network activity events for VPC endpoints are another way to improve your data perimeter.

Operations

Use Amazon Athena, natural language query generation, or SQL-based queries to address operational questions, aid with debugging, and look into problems. To further streamline your studies, use the AI-powered query result summarizing tool (in preview) to summarize query results. Use CloudTrail Lake dashboards to see trends.

Features of AWS CloudTrail

Auditing, security monitoring, and operational troubleshooting are made possible via AWS CloudTrail. CloudTrail logs API calls and user activity across AWS services as events. “Who did what, where, and when?” can be answered with the aid of CloudTrail events.

Four types of events are recorded by CloudTrail:

Control plane activities on resources, like adding or removing Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets, are captured by management events.

Data plane operations within a resource, like reading or writing an Amazon S3 object, are captured by data events.

Network activity events that record activities from a private VPC to the AWS service utilizing VPC endpoints, including AWS API calls to which access was refused (in preview).

Through ongoing analysis of CloudTrail management events, insights events assist AWS users in recognizing and reacting to anomalous activity related to API calls and API error rates.

Trails of AWS CloudTrail

Overview

AWS account actions are recorded by Trails, which then distribute and store the events in Amazon S3. Delivery to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Amazon EventBridge is an optional feature. You can feed these occurrences into your security monitoring programs. You can search and examine the logs that CloudTrail has collected using your own third-party software or programs like Amazon Athena. AWS Organizations can be used to build trails for a single AWS account or for several AWS accounts.

Storage and monitoring

By establishing trails, you can send your AWS CloudTrail events to S3 and, if desired, to CloudWatch Logs. You can export and save events as you desire after doing this, which gives you access to all event details.

Encrypted activity logs

You may check the integrity of the CloudTrail log files that are kept in your S3 bucket and determine if they have been altered, removed, or left unaltered since CloudTrail sent them there. Log file integrity validation is a useful tool for IT security and auditing procedures. By default, AWS CloudTrail uses S3 server-side encryption (SSE) to encrypt all log files sent to the S3 bucket you specify. If required, you can optionally encrypt your CloudTrail log files using your AWS Key Management Service (KMS) key to further strengthen their security. Your log files are automatically decrypted by S3 if you have the decrypt permissions.

Multi-Region

AWS CloudTrail may be set up to record and store events from several AWS Regions in one place. This setup ensures that all settings are applied uniformly to both freshly launched and existing Regions.

Multi-account

CloudTrail may be set up to record and store events from several AWS accounts in one place. This setup ensures that all settings are applied uniformly to both newly generated and existing accounts.

AWS CloudTrail pricing

AWS CloudTrail: Why Use It?

By tracing your user behavior and API calls, AWS CloudTrail Pricing makes audits, security monitoring, and operational troubleshooting possible .

AWS CloudTrail Insights

Through ongoing analysis of CloudTrail management events, AWS CloudTrail Insights events assist AWS users in recognizing and reacting to anomalous activity related to API calls and API error rates. Known as the baseline, CloudTrail Insights examines your typical patterns of API call volume and error rates and creates Insights events when either of these deviates from the usual. To identify odd activity and anomalous behavior, you can activate CloudTrail Insights in your event data stores or trails.