AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables the management, compliance, operational audit, and risk audit of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can continuously monitor and maintain activity-related logging activities across your AWS infrastructure. Cloud Trail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken by the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, Command Line Tools, and other AWS services. This event history facilitates security analysis, resource change monitoring, and troubleshooting. Additionally, you can use CloudTrail to detect abnormal activity in your AWS accounts. These skills help facilitate operational analysis and troubleshooting.
Visibility in your AWS account process is a crucial aspect of security and operational best practices. You can use the cloudtrail to view, search, download, archive, analyze, and respond to account activity throughout your AWS infrastructure. Other details to help you analyze and respond to activity in your AWS account You can identify who or what action was taken, what sources worked when the event occurred, and other details. Optionally, you can enable AWS CloudTrail Intelligence in one track to help you identify and respond to unusual activity.
Benefits
Simplified compliance – With AWS CloudTrail, you simplify your compliance audits by automatically recording and storing event logs for actions done in your AWS account. Integration with Amazon CloudWatch Records provides a convenient way to search through log data, identify non-compliant events, speed up incident inquiries, and respond to auditor requests.
Security analysis and troubleshooting – With AWS CloudTrail, you can diagnose and fix security and operational issues by capturing a detailed history of changes to your AWS account over a while.
Visibility in user and resource processing – The AWS Cloud Trail increases visibility into your user and resource functionality by recording AWS Management Console actions and API calls. You can identify AWS users and accounts, the source IP address for which the calls were made, and when the calls occurred.
Security Automation – AWS CloudTrail allows you to automatically monitor and automatically respond to account activity that threatens your AWS resources. With Amazon CloudWatch Events Integration, you can define workflows that are active when security vulnerabilities are detected. For example, when recording an API call to the CloudTrail you can create a workflow to add a specific policy to the Amazon S3 bucket that will keep that bucket public.
How CloudTrail Works
You can create two types of tracks for an AWS account:
A trial that applies to all regions
When you create a trail that applies to all regions, CloudTrail records events in each region and provides CloudTrail event log files to the S3 bucket you specify. If a section is added after you create a track that applies to all regions, that new section will be added automatically, and events will be logged into that region. This is the default option when creating a trail in the CloudTrail console.
A trail that applies to specific or one region
When you create a trail that fits a region, CloudTrail only records events within that region. It delivers cloudtrail event recording files to the Amazon S3 bucket you specify. If you create additional single traces, those tracks can deliver cloud trail event log files to the same Amazon S3 bucket or split buckets. This is the default option when creating a channel using the AWS CLI or CloudTrail API.