What is AWS CloudTrail?

AWS (Amazon Web Service) is known for the cloud computing solutions and services that support companies to grow their corporate structures without owning large-scale facilities. AWS cloud computing solutions are credible and authoritative; that is why many companies use AWS.

At AWS, easily keeping track of every activity in such a dynamic working environment is always challenging. But it is where AWS CloudTrail comes into play.

This blog discusses AWS CloudTrail and everything you need to know about it.

Table of Contents

What is AWS CloudTrail?

AWS CloudTrial supports your AWS account in governance, risk auditing, and compliance. AWS CloudTrail, also known as a management and governance tool in the AWS console.

Businesses can track records of action taken in the AWS management console, AWS SDKs, AWS Command Line, and APIs. When you create CludTrail, it’s already operational in your AWS account. AWS CloudTrail records every action in the CloudTrail event.

AWS CloudTrail assists companies in tracking their actions, logging activities, and keeping an eye on every move made inside their AWS environments.

Why AWS CloudTrail is crucial for cloud security

AWS CloudTrail is a crucial tool when it comes to managing cloud security and proving compliance in today’s fast-evolving cloud infrastructures. It acts as a logging and monitoring service where all the account activities, including the API calls and user activities, are recorded.

This visibility is important to help recognize security risks like intrusion or other malicious activities since this allows real-time monitoring and analysis of events that have occurred in the network.
From a compliance perspective, CloudTrail is important. GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2 requirements are some of the rules that require extensive documentation of the system activities performed.
CloudTrail helps organizations meet these requirements by providing organizations with a set of immutable logs, that cannot be altered in any way and which can be stored and accessed for long periods.
This makes it possible for businesses to show compliance with the set regulatory requirements in the course of the company and also to be in a position to reply to audit calls.
In addition, CloudTrail works with other AWS security services, including AWS CloudWatch and AWS Config, to improve automated threat detection and response to security incidents.
Besides helping organizations to meet compliance requirements, CloudTrail also assists in the provision of proactive monitoring to track down such activities and thus, strengthens the cloud security architecture of an organization, making it one of the most useful tools for any cloud structure.

How AWS CloudTrail works

When you create an AWS account, the AWS CloudTrail activities automatically. AWS cloudTrail is triggered when any activity is detected, and it records immediately. It can keep a record of up to 90 days and users can check management events in an AWS region under Cloudtrail’s “Event History” tab.

Users can create a trail or an event data store for the events that are happening in real time. An event data store can log non-AWS events from integrations, AWS Config items, Cloudtrail management, data events, and event insights, whereas trails can store log events for Cloudtrail management, data, and event insights.

Features of AWS CloudTrail work

AWS CloudTrail offers many features and benefits. The following table concludes with features, benefits, and their use cases.

Feature	Description	Benefit	Use Case
Event Logging	Records API calls and user actions across AWS services.	Provides detailed information on who did what, when, and from where, enhancing transparency.	Monitoring API activity for auditing purposes, tracking security breaches, and identifying unusual patterns in resource access.
Multi-Region and Multi-Account	Enables logging of activities across multiple AWS regions and accounts.	Centralizes logging for global AWS deployments, ensuring no region is left unmonitored.	Organizations with a multi-region architecture can easily monitor and maintain security across all AWS environments.
Data Integrity and Security	CloudTrail logs are encrypted using AWS Key Management Service (KMS).	Ensures log data is secure and tamper-proof, meeting compliance requirements.	Storing audit logs for long-term compliance needs, with encryption ensuring logs cannot be altered or accessed by unauthorized individuals.
CloudTrail Insights	Automatically detects unusual API activity or spikes in service usage patterns.	Helps identify potential security threats, misuse, or operational anomalies quickly.	We are detecting unusual activity, such as a sudden increase in IAM permissions, to take immediate corrective actions.
Integration with CloudWatch	Can be integrated with AWS CloudWatch to enable real-time monitoring and alerting.	Facilitates automated responses to specific events, improving security and operational efficiency.	Setting up alerts for activities like unauthorized access attempts or changes to critical resources like security groups or access control policies.
Event History	Offers 90 days of API activity history, which is accessible through the AWS Management Console.	Simplifies troubleshooting by providing easy access to recent API activity without needing to configure advanced settings.	Quickly identifying the root cause of operational issues or security incidents by reviewing recent events.
Long-Term Archival	Allows storing CloudTrail logs in Amazon S3 for long-term archive and audit purposes.	Enables organizations to retain logs for extended periods to meet legal, regulatory, and audit requirements.	Meeting compliance requirements for data retention under standards like HIPAA, GDPR, or SOC 2.
Detailed Audit Trail	Provides a comprehensive audit trail of user and service activities across AWS infrastructure.	Supports compliance audits and security forensics by offering immutable records of every action taken.	Facilitating detailed security investigations, internal audits, or meeting third-party regulatory requirements for transparency and accountability.
Filtering and Analysis	CloudTrail logs can be filtered using AWS Athena, CloudWatch Logs Insights, or external SIEM tools.	Enhances the ability to analyze and extract meaningful insights from raw log data, supporting faster decision-making.	Analyzing user behaviour trends, filtering by IP addresses, or investigating activities tied to specific services like EC2 or S3.
Management Events	Captures detailed information on management actions like creating, modifying, or deleting resources.	Helps track important security-related changes and operational modifications.	Auditing critical changes to infrastructure, such as changes to security groups, IAM policies, or launching and terminating EC2 instances.
Data Events	Records S3 object-level API activity and Lambda function executions.	Enables granular logging at the data level, offering deeper visibility into access and modifications of data.	Tracking file uploads/downloads in S3 or executions of Lambda functions to ensure secure handling of sensitive data.
Cross-Account Delivery	Allows CloudTrail logs to be delivered to a single S3 bucket across multiple AWS accounts.	Simplifies log management for organizations with multiple AWS accounts, improving centralized security.	Centralizing logs for enterprises that operate multiple accounts under different departments or regions.
Cost-Effective	CloudTrail offers free logging for management events and charges minimal fees for data events.	Provides a cost-efficient solution for logging activities across AWS environments.	Small-to-medium-sized businesses can leverage essential logging services without significant cost overhead.

Use case of AWS CloudTrail:

Troubleshooting and incident management: AWS CloudTrail helps to analyze any error that may occur in AWS and come up with a solution to the problem. Yes, it is possible to change your AWS account and it is important to find out the root cause of issues.
Security: The main use of it is to track the consumption of the resources within your AWS environment. By using CloudTrail, you can know which AWS resource was changed by which user or application. This is usually done to meet compliance standards such as PCI, HIPAA, and SOX, among others.
Forensic Analysis: it is also used in the case of someone attacking your AWS account. CloudTrail helps to investigate security incidents and conduct a forensic analysis.

How to set up AWS CloudTrail?

You need to set up AWS CloudTrail and have adequate permission to use its features. Such as:

Grant access to CloudTrail for use: You need access to create, update, and manage CloudTrail resources like trails, channels, and event data stores. This section describes information about managed policies for CloudTrail.

AWS-managed policies are available for CloudTrail:

AWS CloudTrail full access: This policy grants full access to Cloudtrail actions on Cloudtrail resources, such as trails, event data stores, and channels. This policy grants the necessary permission to manage CloudTrail trails, event data stores, and channels with create, update, and delete permissions.
However, it does not permit the deletion of the Amazon S3 bucket, the log group for CloudWatch Logs, or an Amazon SNS topic. For information about managed policies for other AWS services, see the AWS Managed Policy Reference Guide.

AWSCloudTrail_ReadOnlyAccess: This policy grants permissions to view the CloudTrail console, including recent events and event history. This policy also allows you to view existing trails, event data stores, and channels. Roles and users with this policy can download the event history, but they can’t create or update trails, event data stores, or channels.
To grant access, assign permissions to your users, groups, or roles:

Users and groups in AWS IAM Identity Center:
Create a permission set. Follow the instructions in Create a permission set in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.
Users managed in IAM through an identity provider:
Create a role for identity federation. Follow the instructions in Creating a role for a third-party identity provider (federation) in the IAM User Guide.
IAM users:
Create a role that your user can assume. Follow the instructions in Creating a role for an IAM user in the IAM User Guide.
(Not recommended) Attach a policy directly to a user or add a user to a user group. Follow the instructions in Adding permissions to a user (console) in the IAM User Guide.

Why Choose SupportFly As an AWS Professional Services Consultant?

Selecting the right AWS professional services consultant is critical to getting the most out of your cloud spend. At SupportFly, we have the experience, affordable solutions, around-the-clock services, and security to offer the best support and knowledge.

Experience

SupportFly has been in the industry for many years and has a team of AWS-certified personnel, which makes it have a lot of experience in the field. We have effectively and efficiently handled and fine-tuned a lot of AWS environments so that your business can benefit from best practices and strategies.

Cost Efficient

Our cost-effective strategy allows you to get the most out of your AWS expenditure. We analyze where you can save money and apply changes that will not affect the performance or security of your AWS environment while helping you optimize your budget.

24×7 Services

SupportFly is truly 24/7, which means that your AWS environment will be always supervised and managed at any time. We have a dedicated support team who will be available to attend to any problems or offer help whenever you require it, thus making your operations continuous.

Security

Security is the most important consideration that is taken into account in this organization. The SupportFly has put in place adequate measures to ensure that your data and applications are secure. Security assessment, vulnerability assessment, compliance check, and penetration testing are some of the ways we make your AWS environment secure and ready to protect against threats.

Conclusion

AWS CloudTrail is a critical service for AWS management. It’s easy to get started. Once started, the logs can be a valuable source of information for governance audits and forensic analysis. The first step in DevSecOps is to set up the trails. The logs would then need to be searched through and examined for any relevant information.

It integrated seamlessly with other AWS services such as CloudWatch and AWS Lambda for auto-monitoring of the system. This way, by establishing multi-region trails, organizations can track events in all the AWS regions, thus having a broad scope. This helps to make certain that your framework is constantly noticed, and this improves the security of infrastructure, in addition to the performance.