How CloudTrail works
You automatically have access to the CloudTrail Event history when you create your AWS account. The Event history provides a viewable, searchable, downloadable, and immutable record of the past 90 days of recorded management events in an AWS Region.
For an ongoing record of events in your AWS account past 90 days, create a trail or a CloudTrail Lake event data store.
Topics
CloudTrail Event history
You can easily view the last 90 days of management events in the CloudTrail console by going
to the Event history page. You can also view the event history by
running the aws cloudtrail
lookup-events command, or the LookupEvents API operation. You can search events in
Event history by filtering for events on a single attribute.
For more information, see Working with CloudTrail Event history.
The Event history is not connected to any trails or event data stores that exist in your account and is not affected by configuration changes you make to your trails and event data stores.
There are no CloudTrail charges for viewing the Event
history page or running the lookup-events command.
CloudTrail Lake and event data stores
You can create an event data store to log CloudTrail events (management events, data events, network activity events), CloudTrail Insights events, AWS Audit Manager evidence, AWS Config configuration items, or events outside of AWS.
Note
Network activity events is in preview release for CloudTrail and is subject to change.
Event data stores can log events from the current AWS Region, or from all AWS Regions in your AWS account. Event data stores that you are using to log Integration events from outside AWS must be for a single Region only; they cannot be multi-Region event data stores.
If you have created an organization in AWS Organizations, you can create an organization event data store that logs all events for all AWS accounts in that organization. Organization event data stores can apply to all AWS Regions, or the current Region. Organization event data stores must be created using the management account or delegated administrator account, and when specified as applying to an organization, are automatically applied to all member accounts in the organization. Member accounts cannot see the organization event data store, nor can they modify or delete it. Organization event data stores cannot be used to collect events from outside of AWS. For more information, see Understanding organization event data stores.
By default, all events in an event data store are encrypted by CloudTrail. When you configure an event data store, you can choose to use your own AWS KMS key. Using your own KMS key incurs AWS KMS costs for encryption and decryption. After you associate an event data store with a KMS key, the KMS key cannot be removed or changed. For more information, see Encrypting CloudTrail log files with AWS KMS keys (SSE-KMS).
The following table provides information about tasks you can perform on event data stores.
| Task | Description |
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You can use CloudTrail Lake dashboards to see event trends for the event data stores in your account. You can view managed dashboards, create custom dashboards, and enable the Highlights dashboard to see highlights for your event data curated and managed by CloudTrail Lake. |
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Configure your event data store to log read-only, write-only, or all management events. By default, event data stores log management events. You can filter management events on the following advanced event selector fields: |
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Configure your event data store to log data events. You can filter data events on the following advanced event selector fields: |
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Configure your event data store to log network activity events. You can use
advanced event selectors to filter on the NoteNetwork activity events is in preview release for CloudTrail and is subject to change. |
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Configure your event data stores to log Insights events to help you identify and respond to unusual activity associated with management API calls. For more information, see Logging Insights events. Additional charges apply for Insights events. You will be charged
separately if you enable Insights for both trails and event data
stores. For more information, see AWS CloudTrail
Pricing |
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You can copy trail events to a new or existing event data store to create a point-in-time snapshot of events logged to the trail. |
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You can federate an event data store to see the metadata associated with the event data store in the AWS Glue Data Catalog and run SQL queries on the event data using Amazon Athena. The table metadata stored in the AWS Glue Data Catalog lets the Athena query engine know how to find, read, and process the data that you want to query. |
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You can stop and start event ingestion on event data stores that collect CloudTrail management and data events, or AWS Config configuration items. |
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You can use CloudTrail Lake integrations to log
and store user activity data from outside of AWS; from any source
in your hybrid environments, such as in-house or SaaS applications
hosted on-premises or in the cloud, virtual machines, or containers.
For information about available integration partners, see AWS CloudTrail Lake
Integrations |
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The CloudTrail console provides a number of sample queries that can help you get started writing your own queries. |
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Queries in CloudTrail are authored in SQL. You can build a query on the CloudTrail Lake Editor tab by writing the query in SQL from scratch, or by opening a saved or sample query and editing it. |
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When you run a query, you can save the query results to an S3 bucket. |
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You can download a CSV file containing your saved CloudTrail Lake query results. |
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You can use CloudTrail query results integrity validation to determine whether the query results were modified, deleted, or unchanged after CloudTrail delivered the query results to the S3 bucket. |
For more information about CloudTrail Lake, see Working with AWS CloudTrail Lake.
CloudTrail Lake event data stores and queries incur charges. When you create an event
data store, you choose the pricing option you
want to use for the event data store. The pricing option determines the cost for
ingesting and storing events, and the default and maximum retention period for the
event data store. When you run queries in Lake, you pay based upon the amount of
data scanned. For information about CloudTrail pricing and managing Lake costs, see AWS CloudTrail Pricing
CloudTrail Lake dashboards
You can use CloudTrail Lake dashboards to see event trends for the event data stores in your account. CloudTrail Lake offers the following types of dashboards:
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AWS managed dashboards – You can view an AWS managed dashboard to see event trends for an event data store that collects management events, data events, or Insights events. These dashboards are automatically available to you and are managed by CloudTrail Lake. CloudTrail offers 14 managed dashboards to choose from. You can manually refresh AWS managed dashboards. You cannot modify, add, or remove the widgets for these dashboards, however, you can save an AWS managed dashboard as a custom dashboard if you want to modify the widgets or set a refresh schedule.
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Custom dashboards – Custom dashboards allow you to query events in any event data store type. You can add up to 10 widgets to a custom dashboard. You can manually refresh a custom dashboard, or you can set a refresh schedule.
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Highlights dashboards – Enable the Highlights dashboard to view an at-a-glance overview of the AWS activity collected by the event data stores in your account. The Highlights dashboard is managed by CloudTrail and includes widgets that are relevant to your account. The widgets shown on the Highlights dashboard are unique to each account. These widgets could surface detected abnormal activity or anomalies. For example, your Highlights dashboard could include the Total cross-account access widget, which shows if there is an increase in abnormal cross-account activity. CloudTrail updates the Highlights dashboard every 6 hours. The dashboard shows the last 24 hours of data from the last update.
Each dashboard consists of one or more widgets and each widget represents a SQL query.
For more information, see CloudTrail Lake dashboards.
CloudTrail trails
A trail is a configuration that enables delivery of events to an Amazon S3 bucket that you specify. You can also deliver and analyze events in a trail with Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Amazon EventBridge.
Trails can log CloudTrail management events, data events, network activity events, and Insights events.
Note
Network activity events is in preview release for CloudTrail and is subject to change.
You can create both multi-Region and single-Region trails for your AWS account.
- Multi-Region trails
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When you create a multi-Region trail, CloudTrail records events in all AWS Regions in the AWS partition in which you are working and delivers the CloudTrail event log files to an S3 bucket that you specify. If an AWS Region is added after you create a multi-Region trail, that new Region is automatically included, and events in that Region are logged. Creating a multi-Region trail is a recommended best practice since you capture activity in all Regions in your account. All trails you create using the CloudTrail console are multi-Region. You can convert a single-Region trail to a multi-Region trail by using the AWS CLI. For more information, see Creating a trail in the console and Converting a trail that applies to one Region to apply to all Regions.
- Single-Region trails
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When you create a single-Region trail, CloudTrail records the events in that Region only. It then delivers the CloudTrail event log files to an Amazon S3 bucket that you specify. You can only create a single-Region trail by using the AWS CLI. If you create additional single trails, you can have those trails deliver CloudTrail event log files to the same S3 bucket or to separate buckets. This is the default option when you create a trail using the AWS CLI or the CloudTrail API. For more information, see Creating, updating, and managing trails with the AWS CLI.
Note
For both types of trails, you can specify an Amazon S3 bucket from any Region.
If you have created an organization in AWS Organizations, you can create an organization trail that logs all events for all AWS accounts in that organization. Organization trails can apply to all AWS Regions, or the current Region. Organization trails must be created using the management account or delegated administrator account, and when specified as applying to an organization, are automatically applied to all member accounts in the organization. Member accounts can see the organization trail, but cannot modify or delete it. By default, member accounts do not have access to the log files for an organization trail in the Amazon S3 bucket.
By default, when you create a trail in the CloudTrail console, your event log files are encrypted with a KMS key. If you choose not to enable SSE-KMS encryption, your event logs are encrypted using Amazon S3 server-side encryption (SSE). You can store your log files in your bucket for as long as you want. You can also define Amazon S3 lifecycle rules to archive or delete log files automatically. If you want notifications about log file delivery and validation, you can set up Amazon SNS notifications.
CloudTrail publishes log files multiple times an hour, about every 5 minutes. These log files contain API calls from services in the account that support CloudTrail. For more information, see CloudTrail supported services and integrations.
Note
CloudTrail typically delivers logs within an average of about 5 minutes
of an API call. This time is not guaranteed. Review the AWS CloudTrail Service Level Agreement
If you misconfigure your trail (for example, the S3 bucket is unreachable), CloudTrail will attempt to redeliver the log files to your S3 bucket for 30 days, and these attempted-to-deliver events will be subject to standard CloudTrail charges. To avoid charges on a misconfigured trail, you need to delete the trail.
CloudTrail captures actions made directly by the user or on behalf of the user by an
AWS service. For example, an AWS CloudFormation CreateStack call can result in
additional API calls to Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon EBS, or other services as required by the
AWS CloudFormation template. This behavior is normal and expected. You can identify if the action
was taken by an AWS service with the invokedby field in the CloudTrail
event.
The following table provides information about tasks you can perform on trails.
| Task | Description |
|---|---|
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Configure your trails to log read-only, write-only, or all management events. |
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You can use advanced event selectors to create fine-grained
selectors to log only those data events of interest. When you use
advanced event selectors, you can filter on the
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Configure your trails to log network activity events. You can configure
advanced event selectors to filter on the NoteNetwork activity events is in preview release for CloudTrail and is subject to change. |
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Configure your trails to log Insights events to help you identify and respond to unusual activity associated with management API calls. Additional charges apply for Insights events. You will be charged
separately if you enable Insights for both trails and event data
stores. For more information, see AWS CloudTrail Pricing |
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After you enable CloudTrail Insights on a trail, you can view up to 90 days of Insights events by using the CloudTrail console or the AWS CLI. |
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After you enable CloudTrail Insights on a trail, you can download a CSV or JSON file containing up to the past 90 days of Insights events for your trail. |
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You can copy existing trail events to a CloudTrail Lake event data store to create a point-in-time snapshot of events logged to the trail. |
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Subscribe to a topic to receive notifications about log file delivery to your bucket. Amazon SNS can notify you in multiple ways, including programmatically with Amazon Simple Queue Service. NoteIf you want to receive SNS notifications about log file deliveries from all Regions, specify only one SNS topic for your trail. If you want to programmatically process all events, see Using the CloudTrail Processing Library. |
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Find and download your log files from the S3 bucket. |
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You can configure your trail to send events to CloudWatch Logs. You can then use CloudWatch Logs to monitor your account for specific API calls and events. NoteIf you configure a trail that applies to all Regions to send events to a CloudWatch Logs log group, CloudTrail sends events from all Regions to a single log group. |
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Log file encryption provides an extra layer of security for your log files. |
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Log file integrity validation helps you verify that log files have remained unchanged since CloudTrail delivered them. |
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You can share log files between accounts. |
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You can aggregate log files from multiple accounts to a single bucket. |
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Analyze your CloudTrail output with a partner solution that integrates with CloudTrail. Partner solutions offer a broad set of capabilities, such as change tracking, troubleshooting, and security analysis. |
You can deliver one copy of your ongoing management events to your S3 bucket at no
charge from CloudTrail by creating a trail, however, there are Amazon S3 storage charges. For
more information about CloudTrail pricing, see AWS CloudTrail Pricing
CloudTrail Insights events
AWS CloudTrail Insights help AWS users identify and respond to unusual activity associated with
API calls and API error rates by continuously analyzing CloudTrail management events. CloudTrail Insights
analyzes your normal patterns of API call volume and API error rates, also called the
baseline, and generates Insights events when the call volume or error
rates are outside normal patterns. Insights events on API call volume are generated for
write management APIs, and Insights events on API error rate are generated for
both read and write management APIs.
By default, CloudTrail trails and event data stores don't log Insights events. You must configure your trail or event data store to log Insights events. For more information, see Logging Insights events with the AWS Management Console and Logging Insights events with the AWS Command Line Interface.
Additional charges apply for Insights events. You will be charged separately if you enable
Insights for both trails and event data stores. For more information, see AWS CloudTrail Pricing
Viewing Insights events for trails and event data stores
CloudTrail supports Insights events for both trails and event data stores, however, there are some differences in how you view and access Insights events.
Viewing Insights events for trails
If you have Insights events enabled on a trail, and CloudTrail detects unusual activity, Insights events are logged to a different folder or prefix in the destination S3 bucket for your trail. You can also see the type of insight and the incident time period when you view Insights events on the CloudTrail console. For more information, see Viewing CloudTrail Insights events for trails with the console.
After you enable CloudTrail Insights for the first time on a trail, it can take up to 36 hours for CloudTrail to deliver the first Insights event, if unusual activity is detected.
Viewing Insights events for event data stores
To log Insights events in CloudTrail Lake, you need a destination event data store that logs Insights events and a source event data store that enables Insights and logs management events. For more information, see Create an event data store for Insights events with the console.
After you enable CloudTrail Insights for the first time on the source event data store, it can take up to 7 days for CloudTrail to deliver the first Insights event to the destination event data store, if unusual activity is detected.
If you have CloudTrail Insights enabled on a source event data store and CloudTrail detects unusual activity, CloudTrail delivers Insights events to your destination event data store. You can then query your destination event data store to get information about your Insights events and can optionally save the query results to an S3 bucket. For more information, see Create or edit a query with the CloudTrail console and View sample queries with the CloudTrail console.
You can view the Insights Events dashboard to visualize the Insights events in your destination event data store. For more information about Lake dashboards, see CloudTrail Lake dashboards.
CloudTrail channels
CloudTrail supports two types of channels:
- Channels for CloudTrail Lake integrations with event sources outside of AWS
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CloudTrail Lake uses channels to bring events from outside of AWS into CloudTrail Lake from external partners that work with CloudTrail, or from your own sources. When you create a channel, you choose one or more event data stores to store events that arrive from the channel source. You can change the destination event data stores for a channel as needed, as long as the destination event data stores are set to log activity events. When you create a channel for events from an external partner, you provide a channel ARN to the partner or source application. The resource policy attached to the channel allows the source to transmit events through the channel. For more information, see Create an integration with an event source outside of AWS and
CreateChannelin the AWS CloudTrail API Reference. - Service-linked channels
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AWS services can create a service-linked channel to receive CloudTrail events on your behalf. The AWS service creating the service-linked channel configures advanced event selectors for the channel and specifies whether the channel applies to all Regions, or the current Region.
You can use the CloudTrail console or AWS CLI to view information about any CloudTrail service-linked channels created by AWS services.
