Amazon CloudWatch logging for AWS Transfer Family servers - AWS Transfer Family
Types of CloudWatch logging for Transfer FamilyCreating Amazon CloudWatch alarmsLogging S3 API calls to S3 access logsUser notifications

Amazon CloudWatch logging for AWS Transfer Family servers

Amazon CloudWatch is a powerful monitoring and observability service that provides comprehensive visibility into your AWS resources, including AWS Transfer Family.

  • Real-time monitoring: CloudWatch monitors Transfer Family resources and applications in real-time, allowing you to track and analyze their performance.

  • Metrics collection: CloudWatch collects and tracks various metrics for your resources and applications, which are variables you can measure and use for analysis.

  • CloudWatch home page: The CloudWatch home page automatically displays metrics about Transfer Family and other AWS services you use, providing a centralized view of your monitoring data.

  • Custom dashboards: You can create custom dashboards in CloudWatch to display metrics specific to your custom applications and the resources you choose to monitor.

  • Alarms and notifications: CloudWatch allows you to create alarms that monitor your metrics and trigger notifications or automated actions when certain thresholds are breached. This can be useful for monitoring file transfer activity in your Transfer Family servers and scaling resources accordingly.

  • Cost optimization: You can use the data collected by CloudWatch to identify under-utilized resources and take actions, such as stopping or deleting instances, to optimize your costs.

Overall, the comprehensive monitoring capabilities in CloudWatch make it a valuable tool for managing and optimizing your Transfer Family infrastructure and the applications running on it.

Types of CloudWatch logging for Transfer Family

Transfer Family provides two ways to log events to CloudWatch:

  • JSON structured logging

  • Logging via a logging role

For Transfer Family servers, you can choose the logging mechanism that you prefer. For connectors and workflows, only logging roles are supported.

JSON structured logging

For logging server events, we recommend using JSON structured logging. This provides a more comprehensive logging format that enables CloudWatch log querying. For this type of logging, the IAM policy for the user that creates the server (or edits the server's logging configuration) must contain the following permissions:

  • logs:CreateLogDelivery

  • logs:DeleteLogDelivery

  • logs:DescribeLogGroups

  • logs:DescribeResourcePolicies

  • logs:GetLogDelivery

  • logs:ListLogDeliveries

  • logs:PutResourcePolicy

  • logs:UpdateLogDelivery

The following is an example policy.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "logs:CreateLogDelivery",
                "logs:GetLogDelivery",
                "logs:UpdateLogDelivery",
                "logs:DeleteLogDelivery",
                "logs:ListLogDeliveries",
                "logs:PutResourcePolicy",
                "logs:DescribeResourcePolicies",
                "logs:DescribeLogGroups"                
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

For details on setting up JSON structured logging, see Creating, updating, and viewing logging for servers.

Logging role

To log events for a managed workflow that is attached to a server, as well as for connectors, you need to specify a logging role. To set access, you create a resource-based IAM policy and an IAM role that provides that access information. The following is an example policy for an AWS account that can log server events.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "logs:CreateLogStream",
                "logs:DescribeLogStreams",
                "logs:CreateLogGroup",
                "logs:PutLogEvents"
            ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:logs:*:*:log-group:/aws/transfer/*"
        }
    ]
}

For details on configuring a logging role to log workflow events see Managing logging for workflows.

Creating Amazon CloudWatch alarms

The following example shows how to create Amazon CloudWatch alarms using the AWS Transfer Family metric, FilesIn.

CDK
new cloudwatch.Metric({
  namespace: "AWS/Transfer",
  metricName: "FilesIn",
  dimensionsMap: { ServerId: "s-00000000000000000" },
  statistic: "Average",
  period: cdk.Duration.minutes(1),
}).createAlarm(this, "AWS/Transfer FilesIn", {
  threshold: 1000,
  evaluationPeriods: 10,
  datapointsToAlarm: 5,
  comparisonOperator: cloudwatch.ComparisonOperator.GREATER_THAN_OR_EQUAL_TO_THRESHOLD,
});
AWS CloudFormation
Type: AWS::CloudWatch::Alarm
Properties:
  Namespace: AWS/Transfer
  MetricName: FilesIn
  Dimensions:
    - Name: ServerId
      Value: s-00000000000000000
  Statistic: Average
  Period: 60
  Threshold: 1000
  EvaluationPeriods: 10
  DatapointsToAlarm: 5
  ComparisonOperator: GreaterThanOrEqualToThreshold

Logging Amazon S3 API operations to S3 access logs

Note

This section does not apply to Transfer Family web apps.

If you are using Amazon S3 access logs to identify S3 requests made on behalf of your file transfer users, RoleSessionName is used to display which IAM role was assumed to service the file transfers. It also displays additional information such as the user name, session id, and server-id used for the transfers. The format is [AWS:Role Unique Identifier]/username.sessionid@server-id and is contained in the Requester field. For example, the following are the contents for a sample Requester field from an S3 access log for a file that was copied to the S3 bucket.

arn:aws:sts::AWS-Account-ID:assumed-role/IamRoleName/username.sessionid@server-id

In the Requester field above, it shows the IAM Role called IamRoleName. For more information about IAM role unique identifiers, see Unique identifiers in the AWS Identity and Access Management User Guide.

Using AWS User Notifications with AWS Transfer Family

To get notified about AWS Transfer Family events, you can use AWS User Notifications to set up various delivery channels. When an event matches a rule that you specify, you receive a notification.

You can receive notifications for events through multiple channels, including email, AWS Chatbot chat notifications, or AWS Console Mobile Application push notifications. You can also see notifications in the Console Notifications Center. User Notifications supports aggregation, which can reduce the number of notifications that you receive during specific events.

For more information, see the Customize file delivery notifications using AWS Transfer Family managed workflows blog post, and What is AWS User Notifications? in the AWS User Notifications User Guide.