AWS CloudTrail: What Is It? And To Describe Features and Advantages

 

CloudTrail on AWS

Keep an eye on user activity and API usage on AWS, as well as in multicloud and hybrid environments.

AWS CloudTrail: What is it?

All AWS account activity, including resource access, modifications, and timing, is recorded by AWS CloudTrail. It keeps an eye on activities from the AWS Management Console, SDKs, APIs, and CLI.

You can use CloudTrail to:

• Monitor Activity: Determine who was in charge of what in your AWS environment.
• Increase security by spotting strange or undesired activity.
• Audit and Compliance: Keep track of all records related to audits and regulatory needs.
• Troubleshoot Issues: Investigate problems by reviewing logs.

Because CloudTrail saves the logs to an Amazon S3 bucket, they may be conveniently reviewed or examined at a later time.

AWS CloudTrail: Why Use It?

The AWS CloudTrail service enables governance, compliance, operational audits, and auditing of your AWS account.

Advantages

Combine and compile events from several sources

AWS activity events can be ingested by CloudTrail Lake, along with those from external sources including other cloud providers, in-house apps, and SaaS apps that are either on-premises or in the cloud.

Events that are audit-worthy are unchangeable

AWS CloudTrail Lake allows for the permanent storage of audit-worthy events. Easily generate audit reports required by corporate policies and external regulations.

Gain knowledge and examine anomalous activity

Examine activity logs and find unauthorized access using SQL-based searches or Amazon Athena. Generative AI-enabled natural language query generation greatly simplifies the process for people who are not as adept at writing SQL queries. Use rules-based Event Bridge notifications and automated processes to respond.

Use cases

Auditing and compliance

To prove adherence to SOC, PCI, and HIPAA regulations and protect your business from penalties, use CloudTrail logs.

Safety

You may improve your security posture by recording user and API activities in your AWS accounts. You may also enhance your data perimeter by using network activity events for VPC endpoints.

Activities

To answer operational questions, assist with debugging, and investigate issues, use SQL-based queries, Amazon Athena, or natural language query creation. Utilize the AI-powered tool for query result summarization (in preview) to further expedite your research. To observe trends, use CloudTrail Lake dashboards.

Features of CloudTrail on AWS

AWS CloudTrail enables operational troubleshooting, security monitoring, and auditing. CloudTrail records user activity and API calls across all AWS services as events. CloudTrail events can help answer the questions, "Who did what, where, and when?"

CloudTrail records four kinds of events:

• Management events record control plane actions on resources, such as adding or deleting Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets.
• Data events record data plane operations within a resource, such as reading or writing an Amazon S3 object.
• Using VPC endpoints, network activity events capture activity from a private VPC to the AWS service, including AWS API requests to which access was denied (in preview).
• Insight events let AWS users identify and respond to unusual activity pertaining to API calls and API error rates by continuously analyzing CloudTrail management events.

AWS CloudTrail Trails

Summary

Trails records the actions of AWS accounts, distributes the events, and stores them in Amazon S3. It is optional to have delivery to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Amazon EventBridge. These events can be fed into your security monitoring software. Using your own third-party software or applications such as Amazon Athena, you can search and review the logs that CloudTrail has gathered. Trails for a single AWS account or several AWS accounts can be created using AWS Organizations.

Storage and observation

You can transmit your AWS CloudTrail events to S3 and, if you'd like, to CloudWatch Logs by creating trails. After doing this, you have access to all event data and can export and store events as you choose.

Logs of encrypted activities

To find out if the CloudTrail log files stored in your S3 bucket have been changed, deleted, or left untouched since CloudTrail transferred them there, you can verify their integrity. Validating log file integrity is a helpful tool for auditing and IT security processes. All log files transmitted to the S3 bucket you designate are automatically encrypted by AWS CloudTrail using S3 server-side encryption (SSE). To increase the security of your CloudTrail log files, you can choose to encrypt them using your AWS Key Management Service (KMS) key if necessary. If you have the decrypt permissions, S3 will automatically decrypt your log files.

Multiple Regions

Events from many AWS Regions can be recorded and stored in one location using AWS CloudTrail. With this configuration, all adjustments are applied consistently to both newly launched and already-existing Regions.

Multiple accounts

Events from several AWS accounts can be recorded and stored in one location using CloudTrail. This configuration guarantees that every setting is implemented consistently to both freshly created and pre-existing accounts.

Pricing for AWS CloudTrail

Why Use AWS CloudTrail?

AWS CloudTrail Pricing enables audits, security monitoring, and operational troubleshooting by tracking your user activity and API requests.

CloudTrail insights from AWS

AWS CloudTrail Insights events let AWS users identify and respond to unusual activity pertaining to API calls and API error rates by continuously analyzing CloudTrail management events. CloudTrail Insights analyzes your normal patterns of error rates and API call volume, referred to as the baseline, and generates Insights events when either of these diverges from the norm. You can turn on CloudTrail Insights in your event data stores or trails to spot strange activity and unusual behavior.