Introduction to AWS logging - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

- Let's begin by talking about AWS Logging. Logging is the process of recording events, actions, and data within your AWS environment. It is a crucial aspect of maintaining security, troubleshooting issues, and ensuring compliance in the cloud. AWS provides logging services to help you monitor and analyze your infrastructure and applications. Logging offers several benefits. It provides visibility into your cloud environment. It helps in troubleshooting and debugging. It enables security analysis and threat detection, supports compliance and auditing requirements, and also helps with performance optimization. Let's look at an example. Imagine you are running an e-commerce website on AWS. One day, you notice a sudden spike in failed login attempts. Without proper logging, you would be in the dark about what's happening. But with logging services, you can quickly identify the source of these attempts, determine if it's a potential security threat, and take appropriate action. AWS has several logging services each designed for a specific use case. This includes AWS CloudTrail, CloudWatch Logs, S3 Access Logs, and VPC Flow Logs. Let's talk about these. First is AWS CloudTrail. CloudTrail records API calls and account activity across your AWS infrastructure. It provides a history of events for your account, including actions taken through the AWS Management console, AWS SDKs, or software development kits, and command line tools. Consider a scenario where an unauthorized change is made to your AWS resources. With CloudTrail, you can trace back who made the change and when it was made. This level of detail is invaluable for security and compliance purposes. Next is Amazon CloudWatch Logs. CloudWatch Logs is a centralized logging service that allows you to monitor, store, and access log files from various AWS services and applications. For instance, let's say you're running a web application on Amazon EC2 Instances. You can use CloudWatch Logs to collect and analyze your application logs, system logs, and access logs all in one place. This centralization makes it easier to spot trends or issues across your entire application stack. Before we move to the next logging service, let's understand the differences between CloudTrail and CloudWatch logs. CloudTrail records API calls and account activity in your AWS account, while CloudWatch Logs serves as a central location to aggregate logs from AWS services and custom applications. CloudTrail captures API calls, user actions, and account events. CloudWatch Logs stores application logs, system logs, and even custom logs from your applications. CloudTrail collects data from the AWS Management console, command line interface, and software development kits, or SDKs. CloudWatch Logs receives logs from AWS services, such as EC2 and Lambda, as well as your customer applications. CloudTrail is mainly used for auditing and tracking changes. CloudWatch Logs is used for monitoring, troubleshooting, and analyzing the performance of your services and applications. Here is an example. Imagine you are running a web application on AWS. You would use CloudTrail to audit any changes made to the environment. You would use CloudWatch Logs to diagnose any issues with the application by analyzing logs and error messages. Next is Amazon S3 Access Logs. For applications that rely heavily on S3 for storage, S3 Access Logs provide detailed records of requests made to an S3 bucket. Let's say you are hosting large media files on S3 for a streaming service. S3 Access Logs can help you understand usage patterns, identify the most popular content, and even detect potentially unauthorized access attempts. Lastly, we have VPC Flow Logs. VPC Flow Logs is a feature that allows you to capture information about IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in your VPC. Imagine you are running a multi-tier application in a VPC. With VPC Flow Logs, you can monitor network traffic between your web servers, application servers, and database servers. This can help you identify potential security issues such as unexpected traffic patterns or attempts to access restricted resources. As you can see, AWS offers a range of logging services each designed to give you visibility into different aspects of your cloud environment. Whether you need to track API activity, monitor application logs, analyze storage access, or review network traffic, AWS has a tool to help. In the following video, we'll take a closer look at AWS CloudTrail. You will learn how CloudTrail records API activity across your AWS account, what kind of information it captures, and how you can use these logs to monitor user actions and investigate changes.