Summary:
AWS CloudTrail is a service that provides governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This enables risk auditing, operational auditing, and compliance monitoring by providing a detailed history of AWS API calls for an account, including API calls made via the Management Console, SDKs, command-line tools, and higher-level AWS services.
Key Features:
- Event History: Allows you to view, search, and download the last 90 days of your account’s activity.
- Management Events: Provides visibility into management operations that are performed on resources in your AWS account.
- Data Events: Records S3 bucket and Lambda function execution activity for detailed auditing.
- Customizable Log File Delivery: Enables you to specify an existing S3 bucket for log file delivery and choose the frequency of log file delivery.
- Integration with AWS Services: Integrates with Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Amazon CloudWatch Events, making it easier to define metrics and generate alerts based on CloudTrail event data.
Partner Link:
Tangible Benefits:
- Enhanced Security and Compliance Monitoring:
- Quantification Path: Measure the reduction in the time taken to detect and respond to security incidents before and after implementing CloudTrail. Assess improvements in compliance with standards and regulations by monitoring the number of non-compliant incidents over time.
- Operational Efficiency in Resource Management:
- Quantification Path: Evaluate the operational efficiency gains by tracking the time spent in auditing and troubleshooting resource activities before and after CloudTrail’s integration. Assess reductions in resource mismanagement incidents.
- Cost Management and Optimization:
- Quantification Path: Analyze and quantify cost savings achieved through more effective resource and user activity tracking, leading to better resource allocation and usage optimization.