Monitoring and logging is crucial for businesses that are operated on cloud-environments as it is an important part of maintenance. It ensures cloud operations are running smoothly with security.
AWS CloudTrail and CloudWatch both tools are used for monitoring and logging. AWS Cloudtrails is used for logging internal AWS usage whereas AWS Cloudwatch is responsible for monitoring your cloud computing systems and AWS Services. Both are different
In this blog post we will go through the overview of CloudTrail and cloudwatch and we’ll compare both the tools, exploring their key features, use cases, differences and similarities.
Now let’s see what CloudTrail is in AWS.
Table of Contents
What is AWS CloudTrail?
AWS Cloudtrail is a tool that provides the records of all the activities in your AWS account. Regardless, activities are done by users, services or applications. Cloudtrail records all API calls or actions taken by applications in your AWS account. It has these records as cloud trail logs in S3 buckets.
It records everything you do in your AWS environment related to EC2 Instances(creating and terminating) using API calls.
Trail is a configuration that allows you to send CloudTrail Events to S3 buckets or CloudWatch Logs.
It is considered as a good practice to separate different aws cloudtrail logs for different purposes.
Compliance is a good feature of cloudtrails. Integrating cloudtrail with the cloudwatch you can monitor events and cater to the needs of auditor requests in an aws environment setup.
Key features of Amazon Cloud Trail
The key features of Amazon CloudTrail are following:
- Creating a detailed log
- Log transfer to CloudWatch Logs or S3 buckets
- Integration with other AWS services
- Log file integrity validation
- Showing identity of the users and source IP Address
- Displays start time of the AWS API callÂ
- You can see Instance ID as response parameters
Example of CloudTrail S3
Using CloudTrail you can know who took that API action and who created the S3 bucket and which user changed a bucket’s visibility setting of a Lambda function.You can find who shut down the RDS server.
Use Cases of CloudTrail AWS?
- Security & Compliance
- Forensic Analysis
- Troubleshooting
- Events Management
What is Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring, logging, and metrics tool that can be used for real-time monitoring of AWS systems and applications. It provides reports of activities happening in AWS resources within your AWS account.
CloudWatch uses multiple products such as Metrics, Alarms, CloudWatch Logs, CloudWatch Events, and CloudWatch Dashboards to collect, access, correlate, and visualize data on a single platform.
CloudWatch comprises various key components to perform the monitoring process including
- CloudWatch Logs: Centralized logging for your Cloud environment.Â
- CloudWatch Metrics: Repository to store and analyze metrics.
- CloudWatch Alarms: To create automated alarms that react on the threshold of metrics.
- CloudWatch X-Ray: To trace distributed requests.
- CloudWatch Synthetics: For regular check aws logs of health of applications.
- CloudWatch Evidently: A/B Testing & Feature Flagging
Features of AWS Cloud Watch
CloudWatch amazon include the following features:
- CloudWatch Dashboards: This provides a view of metrics and alarms to view.
- CloudWatch Unified Agent: It is used for collecting customizable metrics and logs.
- CloudWatch Synthetics: It tests and monitors application endpoints.
Use Cases for AWS CloudWatch
Everything related to your cloud metrics or aws logs can be considered as CloudWatch use cases.
Here are some of the examples:
1. Alarms for Lambda Function Errors
An automated alarm is a common use case for CloudWatch.Using Cloudwatch monitoring you can configure your alarm so that it can react on the threshold of the metrics.
This alarm can have different actions such as Send E-Mail, Call another Lambda Function, Call Pagerduty, CloudWatch Alarm Example
2. Dashboards
AmazonCloudWatch also allows you to create Dashboards. AWS Dashboard service is useful to analyze system behavior and current workload.
AWS CloudWatch builds automatic dashboards for services like DynamoDB, API Gateway, or Lambda.
3. Debug User Requests
With CloudWatch Amazon you can find logs more easily by using CloudWatch Log Insights and X-Ray.
Difference between AWS Cloudtrail and Cloudwatch
CloudTrail records API activities in your AWS account whereas CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS resources and applications. In this section we will dive into an in-depth comparison and similarities of AWS Cloudtrail and CloudWatch.
Let’s get started.
1. CloudTrail vs. CloudWatch: Integration with other servicesÂ
AWS CloudTrail provides seamless integration with AWS CloudWatch, AWS ElasticSearch, AWS Lambda, third-party monitoring platforms, AWS SNS(Amazon Simple Notification Service), AWS SQS(Amazon Simple Queue Service), etc.
On the other hand AWS CloudWatch offers integration with AWS CloudTrail, EC2 instances, autoscaling, load balancers, AWS SNS(Amazon Simple Notification Service), AWS SQS(Amazon Simple Queue Service), AWS RDS(Amazon Rational Database Service), AWS S3, AWS DynamoDB, other AWS resources.
2. CloudTrail vs. CloudWatch: Monitoring Tool
AWS CloudTrail monitors actions or activities in the AWS environment within your AWS account whereas Amazon CloudWatch is a AWS application monitoring tool that monitors applications and infrastructure performance in the AWS environment .
3. CloudTrail vs. CloudWatch: UsageÂ
AWS Cloud Trail is an aws tool that you can know about the individuals who made requests, type of services used, actions performed, the parameters for those actions, and the response components returned by the AWS service.
In contrast using CloudWatch AWS you can collect metrics, track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms & visualize them.
4. AWS CloudTrail vs. CloudWatch: Logs or Event Data Frequency
Amazon Cloud Trail can record and publish the data of an event within 15 minutes of the API call while Amazon Cloud Watch has a capability of viewing metrics in 5-minute intervals for essential or basic monitoring and 1-minute intervals for detailed monitoring. Log data will be sent by the AWS CloudWatch agent every 5 seconds.
6. CloudWatch vs. CloudTrail: Case Studies
If any of your web applications running on your AWS cloud environment Amazon cloud watch monitors its bandwidth usage, overall performance, and parameters of traffic in your application.
Suppose, the security of your EC2 instance is compromised then AWS cloudtrail logs play an important role in identifying the attacker.
6. AWS CloudTrail vs. AWS CloudWatch: Free featuresÂ
AWS Cloudtrail provides free recording management events related to application API calls. while Cloudwatch monitoring feature offers basic monitoring, dashboard creation, alarms, and logs. Moreover it provides access to basic metrics including CPU and disk usage, and network traffic.
7. CloudTrail vs. CloudWatch: Paid featuresÂ
Cloud trails offers paid features of viewing and search capabilities for event history within a maximum of 90 days. Cloud trails capture insight and data events and create custom trails with advanced configurations.
Nonetheless cloud watch paid feature offers detailed AWS logging and monitoring, and custom metrics.These features offers extended log storage and advanced analytics and visualization tools with advanced alarm features like anomaly detection and composite alarms.
8. CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail PricingÂ
CloudTrail logs management is available for no charge. You can view, search, and download the most recent 90-day history of your account’s control plane activity at no additional cost using CloudTrail in the CloudTrail console. You can also use the CloudTrail lookup-events API to achieve this.
While Amazon CloudWatch pricing is depending on several factors including the number of metrics monitored and how frequently metrics get fed to CloudWatch.
Free tier pricing is available for CloudWatch, but monitoring can get expensive once the tiers are exhausted.
The U.S. East pricing catalog for CloudWatch as lists the following:
| ‎Standard | $0.50 per GB |
| ‎Infrequent Access | $0.25 per GB |
| Store (Archival) | $0.03 per GB |
| Analyze (Logs Insights queries) | $0.005 per GB of data scanned |
| Detect and Mask (Data Protection) | $0.12 per GB of data scanned |
| Analyze (Live Tail) | $0.01 per minute |
Choose Supportfly for AWS Professional Services
Managing the complex AWS services such as Cloudtrail and cloudwatch can be challenging. That’s where SupportFly’s role comes into play. Our AWS Professional Services are tailored to help you make the most of all AWS services including AWS CloudTrail and CloudWatch, ensuring your environment is smooth, secure, compliant, and optimized for performance.
Our AWS professional services include:
- Server Configuration & Setup
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- AWS Cost Optimization
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- CI/CD Pipeline on AWS
- AWS Security Support
Conclusion
In conclusion, while both AWS CloudWatch and CloudTrail are monitoring and logging services but they are served for different purposes. CloudWatch is used to monitor and log the events of an application, while CloudTrail is used to track all applications’ API activities in AWS accounts.It’s essential to understand the differences between Amazon CloudWatch and CloudTrail to make informed decisions about which service to use.
In this article, we have covered the various attributes of AWS services CloudWatch and CloudTrail. We hope you have learned how AWS CloudWatch utilizes its features, such as Logs and Alarms within an AWS environment. You have also learned the logging capability of AWS CloudTrail and the log file validation feature. Finally, we explored in-depth comparison of AWS CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail.
By understanding the distinct roles of AWS CloudTrail and CloudWatch and leveraging the expertise of SupportFly, you can ensure your AWS infrastructure is both secure and efficient. Don’t let the complexities of AWS slow you down. Contact us today to learn how our AWS Managed Consulting Professional Services can help you achieve your goals with confidence.
