Enabling Amazon CloudWatch Logs log forwarding for AWS Managed Microsoft AD

You can use either the AWS Directory Service console or APIs to forward domain controller security event logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs for your AWS Managed Microsoft AD. This helps you to meet your security monitoring, audit, and log retention policy requirements by providing transparency of the security events in your directory.

CloudWatch Logs can also forward these events to other AWS accounts, AWS services, or third party applications. This makes it easier for you to centrally monitor and configure alerts to detect and respond proactively to unusual activities in near real time.

Once enabled, you can then use the CloudWatch Logs console to retrieve the data from the log group you specified when you enabled the service. This log group contains the security logs from your domain controllers.

For more information about log groups and how to read their data, see Working with log groups and log streams in the Amazon CloudWatch Logs User Guide.

Using the AWS Management Console to enable Amazon CloudWatch Logs log forwarding

You can enable Amazon CloudWatch Logs log forwarding for your AWS Managed Microsoft AD in the AWS Management Console.

Using the CLI or PowerShell to enable Amazon CloudWatch Logs log forwarding

Before you can use the ds create-log-subscription command, you must first create an Amazon CloudWatch log group and then create an IAM resource policy that will grant the necessary permission to that group. To enable log forwarding using the CLI or PowerShell, complete the following steps.

Step 1: Create a log group in CloudWatch Logs

Create a log group that will be used to receive the security logs from your domain controllers. We recommend pre-pending the name with /aws/directoryservice/, but that is not required. For example:

CLI Command

aws logs create-log-group --log-group-name '/aws/directoryservice/d-1111111111'

PowerShell Command

New-CWLLogGroup -LogGroupName '/aws/directoryservice/d-1111111111'

For instructions on how to create a CloudWatch Logs group, see Create a log group in CloudWatch Logs in the Amazon CloudWatch Logs User Guide.

Step 2: Create a CloudWatch Logs resource policy in IAM

Create a CloudWatch Logs resource policy granting AWS Directory Service rights to add logs into the new log group you created in Step 1. You can either specify the exact ARN to the log group to limit AWS Directory Service’s access to other log groups or use a wild card to include all log groups. The following sample policy uses the wild card method to identify that all log groups that start with /aws/directoryservice/ for the AWS account where your directory resides will be included.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": {
                "Service": "ds.amazonaws.com"
            },
            "Action": [
                "logs:CreateLogStream",
                "logs:PutLogEvents"
            ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:logs:YOUR_REGION:YOUR_ACCOUNT_NUMBER:log-group:/aws/directoryservice/*"
        }
    ]
}

You will need to save this policy to a text file (for example DSPolicy.json) on your local workstation as you will need to run it from the CLI. For example:

CLI Command

aws logs put-resource-policy --policy-name DSLogSubscription --policy-document
          file://DSPolicy.json

PowerShell Command

$PolicyDocument = Get-Content .\DSPolicy.json –Raw

Write-CWLResourcePolicy -PolicyName DSLogSubscription -PolicyDocument $PolicyDocument

Step 3: Create an AWS Directory Service log subscription

In this final step, you can now proceed to enable log forwarding by creating the log subscription. For example:

CLI Command

aws ds create-log-subscription --directory-id 'd-1111111111' --log-group-name '/aws/directoryservice/d-1111111111'

PowerShell Command

New-DSLogSubscription -DirectoryId 'd-1111111111' -LogGroupName '/aws/directoryservice/d-1111111111'