Monitoring AWS CloudTrail Events with Amazon CloudWatch
Lab Steps
The hands-on lab is part of these learning paths
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Description
AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables you to log, monitor, and capture API-related events across your AWS infrastructure and most AWS services. Events that CloudTrail captures get delivered to an S3 bucket, and are also available for viewing from the CloudTrail console. CloudTrail captures, creates, modifies, and deletes API calls triggered from the console, API, command line tools, or even other AWS services. Optionally, CloudTrail can be configured to send events to CloudWatch as well (and this Lab does indeed tackle that, too). Typical use cases for CloudTrail, operating with CloudWatch, are monitoring, auditing, and security (governance, compliance, analysis).
It is important to know that CloudTrail is not a replacement for CloudWatch. It simply adds to the monitoring capabilities offered by AWS. Notice the focus for each service:
- CloudTrail focuses on API activity
- CloudWatch focuses on performance monitoring and overall system health
Prerequisites
Although this is a beginner level Lab, it is on the more challenging side for beginners (almost intermediate ;-). You should be familiar with AWS basics including:
- Using the AWS Console
- S3 (bucket and folder creation, uploading files to S3)
- EC2 (creating and launching a basic instance)
- Conceptual understanding of CloudWatch and Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this Lab, you will be able to:
- Turn on and configure CloudTrail to capture key events and deliver log files to a specific S3 bucket
- Navigate the S3 bucket structure where CloudTrail logs are stored (as compressed JSON files)
- Generate traffic in order to verify CloudTrail is working
- Use the CloudTrail console to learn more about the events CloudTrail captures
- Configure CloudTrail to send events to CloudWatch
- Create a metric filter and alarm so that you receive a notification when specific events occur in AWS
Lab Environment
After completing the lab instructions the environment will look similar to:
Updates
December 18th, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI
June 13, 2022 - Updated instructions and screenshots to reflect the new launch instance wizard
May 11, 2022 - Updated instructions & screenshots
May 9th, 2022 - Updated lab security policy to support the new requirements for enabling CloudWatch logs from CloudTrail
August 13th, 2020 - Modified instructions to let students know that certain warning messages can be ignored
June 4th, 2020 - Modified the CloudTrail Trail validation check to be more tolerant of name and region variations
June 3rd, 2020 - Addressed an issue with the IAM policy
June 28th, 2019 - Added more S3 permissions to suppress S3 error messages that appear during the lab and improved instructions related to opening log files
January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation Lab Step to check the work you perform in the Lab
Greg has been a consistent high performer for pioneering technologies in the wireless web industries with an illustrious career that is a testament to his breadth of knowledge. Dabbling with MS Azure, at Cloud Academy, Greg really thrives on evangelizing the benefits of Amazon Web Services. A dedicated and passionate professional who learns new and emerging technologies quickly, Greg always ensures the highest quality and caliber of everything he produces.