Monitoring Your AWS Account

Implementing monitoring and traceability in your AWS environment is important for ensuring security, operational excellence, and compliance. AWS offers several key tools for tracking activities, monitoring performance, and maintaining resource integrity. This lesson includes an overview of the most important services and their use cases.

AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail provides a detailed record of all API calls and activities across your AWS environment. It captures actions performed by users, services, and even automated systems, making it invaluable for auditing and security.

• Key Features :
  • Tracks API calls across all AWS services.
  • Supports multi-region logging and log file validation.
  • Provides integration with AWS Security Hub and third-party SIEM tools.
• Use Cases :
  • Auditing : Prove compliance by generating logs of all activities.
  • Incident Response : Investigate unauthorized access or suspicious activities.
  • Monitoring API Usage : Track resource creation, deletion, or modification.

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is a real-time monitoring service that provides insights into AWS resources and applications through metrics, logs, and alarms. It helps ensure systems are operating efficiently and alerts you to potential issues.

• Key Features :
  • Tracks performance metrics like CPU utilization, memory, and disk I/O.
  • Allows custom metrics for application-specific tracking.
  • Provides alerts that can trigger automated actions.
• Use Cases :
  • Performance Monitoring : Track key metrics to ensure application health.
  • Error Detection : Identify anomalies in application logs.
  • Automation : Trigger scaling, notifications, or other actions based on thresholds.

Example Table: Metrics Monitored by CloudWatch

Metric	Example Use Case
CPU Utilization	Monitor EC2 instance health
Request L…