Getting started with AWS logging and monitoring

With the demand for cloud-based resources at an all-time high, the need for logging and monitoring has become critical to ensure security and keep your cloud infrastructure intact.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a suite of tools and services that help you track your cloud environments and swiftly deploy security measures to fix vulnerabilities, optimize network configurations, and troubleshoot problems. The event logging feature allows you to run security analysis on the cloud where sensitive workloads and data reside.

AWS monitoring vs. observability

Monitoring involves collecting, analyzing, and keeping tabs on your system's security posture in real time to identify suspicious activities promptly. Observability goes beyond monitoring, offering a complete analysis of your infrastructure's behavior and helping diagnose issues in your intricate cloud environment. Observability tools use logs, events, and metrics to drill down to the cause of system issues.

Monitoring and observability are indispensible for organisations that host their services in the cloud. Together, these practices help you gain an understanding of your system's health.

The importance of logging and monitoring your AWS resources

Logging and monitoring your AWS resources helps you gain visibility into your infrastructure. This enables you to:

• Detect anomalous behavior within your cloud networks.
• Comply with regulatory mandates and safeguard your sensitive information from breaches.
• Set alarms and trigger automated actions when abnormalities are detected in your cloud systems.
• Collect and analyze data to provide useful information to troubleshoot issues within your network.
• Optimize your resources wisely by gaining full visibility into your infrastructure.

Native AWS logging and monitoring tools

Amazon provides an array of tools and services to collect and store logs, each having its own characteristics and dedicated use cases.

AWS CloudWatch provides full-stack observability. It collects and keeps track of events in your cloud resources, providing a comprehensive view into your infrastructure. The sheer amount of data that gets logged by CloudWatch can be used to trigger automated actions and generate detailed reports, empowering you to make informed decisions and address issues proactively. CloudWatch comprises subsets that form a complete package to monitor your AWS workload seamlessly.

• CloudWatch Logs centralizes logs from all your applications, CloudTrail, and other AWS services. You can also create logs based on certain patterns, and alarms can be set up to notify you when those patterns are detected.
• CloudWatch Metrics are data points that track the performance and health of your applications and resources over time. This helps you detect operational bottlenecks and gain more control over optimizing your resource allocation.
• CloudWatch Events delivers on-the-go data for system events. It easily spots operational changes that occur within your AWS resources.

AWS provides the logging service CloudTrail, which records all API calls made within your environment. It can deliver your logs to an Amazon S3 bucket, where you can analyze them further. One of the many features of CloudTrail is its visibility into who accessed your resources, when, and what actions were performed, enabling you to strictly adhere to compliance mandates and maintain a strong security posture in your AWS environment.

Amazon GuardDuty is a diagnostic service that monitors for abnormal or unauthorized behavior to help protect your AWS workloads. It harnesses the power of ML and threat intelligence to detect threats at each layer of your Kubernetes deployment on Amazon EKS.

Understanding the challenges of monitoring native AWS instances

AWS's monitoring tools can help your organization ensure the security of its cloud-based applications. However, monitoring the full scope of your AWS environment can be tedious. That's why it's best to deploy a third-party tool that will cover any security and performance blind spots left behind by the native tools. ManageEngine Log360 Cloud provides out-of-the-box dashboards for visualizations, sets up predefined alerts, and advanced threat detection to aid you through every step of your log management process.

With an increasing number of security standards, understanding and meeting your organization's compliance requirements has become more complex than ever. Log360 Cloud enables you to forward your event logs from AWS tools seamlessly. Its compliance audit feature brings insights to help you take control of your resources and conform to mandates.

Try Log360 Cloud's quick integrations to secure your AWS services

To achieve visibility across your entire stack, it's best to turn to a third-party solution that can pinpoint security issues more efficiently than native AWS tools. ManageEngine Log360 Cloud sees log data over various sources using agent-based log collection, log importing, and agentless log collection for cloud log sources. Log360 Cloud supports agentless log collection for AWS tools, like AWS CloudTrail logs, AWS S3 logs, ELB, and more. The collected logs are then parsed and normalised automatically for effective log analysis and visualization. With Log360 Cloud, you can turn your vast amounts of data into meaningful security insights to ensure visibility into your entire infrastructure.

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