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AWS CloudTrail

Score8.8 out of 10

57 Reviews and Ratings

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What is AWS CloudTrail?

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of an AWS account. With CloudTrail, users can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting. In addition, you can use CloudTrail to detect unusual activity in AWS accounts. These capabilities help simplify operational analysis and troubleshooting.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Screenshot of CloudTrail Insights: Identify and respond to unusual operational activity •Unexpected spikes in resource provisioning •Bursts of IAM management actions •Gaps in periodic maintenance activity •Automatic analysis of API calls and usage patterns •Alerts when unusual activity is detected

Screenshot of CloudTrail Insights: Identify and respond to unusual operational activity •Unexpected spikes in resource provisioning •Bursts of IAM management actions •Gaps in periodic maintenance activity •Automatic analysis of API calls and usage patterns •Alerts when unusual activity is detected

Reviews

What users are saying about AWS CloudTrail.
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A must-have tool-kit for cloud auditing and monitoring

Incentivized
Anton Smyslov
Product Owner in Information Technology at Sunday (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Mainly we're using it for an audit trail of all actions done in AWS CloudTrail and for user activity of course. Moreover, our Dev-Ops were using it to debug AWS services, especially understanding what and why went wrong during the AWS CloudTrail setup or changes. The scope is mainly audit/logging of API calls and monitoring, mainly detecting unusual or suspicious activities.

Pros

  • API Log
  • User activity tracking
  • Real-time alerts

Cons

  • UI/UX is not the easiest and greatest
  • Advanced filtering (mainly logs overload)
  • Not flexible alerting system

Return on Investment

  • Enhanced security of course
  • Quick troubleshooting
  • Readiness for audit (significant time saver)

Alternatives Considered

Datadog and New Relic

Other Software Used

New Relic, Datadog, Adjust by AppLovin

Cloudtrail - Indispensable logging & audit tool

Incentivized
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • Implementation - easy across organisation/accounts
  • AWS support
  • Detailed logs

Cons

  • Delay
  • User interface, must send logs elsewhere to view them

Most Important Features

  • Logging
  • Ease of use

Return on Investment

  • Allows us to investigate any strange api actions
  • Increases security
  • Audit trail of changes made in AWS

Other Software Used

Splunk Cloud, Amazon CloudWatch

Dive deeper to your logs and understand everything using CloudTrail

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Logs details
  • Easy implementation
  • Great support

Cons

  • It could be more commercial

Most Important Features

  • Log Monitoring
  • Integration with our services

Return on Investment

  • Since we started using CloudTrail, we could understand better our product usage and consequently understand our customer's profiles.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon CloudWatch

Other Software Used

Evernote, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics, AWS Glue, AWS Batch, AWS Chatbot, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline, AWS Firewall Manager, AWS Cloud9

AWS CloudTrail Review

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • AWS native service
  • Extremely powerful
  • Multi-region support
  • Optional encryption
  • File integrity validation

Cons

  • [In my experience] Cost can easily get out of control with multiple trails on full logging
  • Logs can be difficult to decipher

Most Important Features

  • Multi-region support
  • Log file integrity validation
  • Integration with other AWS services like SNS / SQS
  • "Always on"

Return on Investment

  • Saved us from purchasing and managing 3rd party solutions
  • Satisfies Security/Governance requirements
  • No upkeep/maintenance

Other Software Used

Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Enterprise Security, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Rancher, Kubernetes, PyCharm, Docker, Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), Postman

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