Sending web ACL traffic logs to a Amazon CloudWatch Logs log group

This topic provides information for sending your web ACL traffic logs to a CloudWatch Logs log group.

To send logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs, you create a CloudWatch Logs log group. When you enable logging in AWS WAF, you provide the log group ARN. After you enable logging for your web ACL, AWS WAF delivers logs to the CloudWatch Logs log group in log streams.

When you use CloudWatch Logs, you can explore the logs for your web ACL in the AWS WAF console. In your web ACL page, select the tab Logging insights. This option is in addition to the logging insights that are provided for CloudWatch Logs through the CloudWatch console.

Configure the log group for AWS WAF web ACL logs in the same Region as the web ACL and using the same account as you use to manage the web ACL. For information about configuring a CloudWatch Logs log group, see Working with Log Groups and Log Streams.

Quotas for CloudWatch Logs log groups

CloudWatch Logs has a default maximum quota for throughput, shared across all log groups within a region, which you can request to increase. If your logging requirements are too high for the current throughput setting, you'll see throttling metrics for PutLogEvents for your account. To view the limit in the Service Quotas console and request an increase, see the CloudWatch Logs PutLogEvents quota.

Log group naming

Your log group names must start with aws-waf-logs- and can end with any suffix you like, for example, aws-waf-logs-testLogGroup2.

The resulting ARN format is as follows:

arn:aws:logs:Region:account-id:log-group:aws-waf-logs-log-group-suffix

The log streams have the following naming format:

Region_web-acl-name_log-stream-number

The following shows an example log stream for web ACL TestWebACL in Region us-east-1.

us-east-1_TestWebACL_0

Permissions required to publish logs to CloudWatch Logs

Configuring web ACL traffic logging for a CloudWatch Logs log group requires the permissions settings described in this section. The permissions are set for you when you use one of the AWS WAF full access managed policies, AWSWAFConsoleFullAccess or AWSWAFFullAccess. If you want to manage finer-grained access to your logging and AWS WAF resources, you can set the permissions yourself. For information about managing permissions, see Access management for AWS resources in the IAM User Guide. For information about the AWS WAF managed policies, see AWS managed policies for AWS WAF.

These permissions allow you to change the web ACL logging configuration, to configure log delivery for CloudWatch Logs, and to retrieve information about your log group. These permissions must be attached to the user that you use to manage AWS WAF.

{
   "Version":"2012-10-17",
   "Statement":[
      {
         "Action":[

            "wafv2:PutLoggingConfiguration",
            "wafv2:DeleteLoggingConfiguration"
         ],
         "Resource":[
            "*"
         ],
         "Effect":"Allow",
         "Sid":"LoggingConfigurationAPI"
      }
      {
         "Sid":"WebACLLoggingCWL",
         "Action":[
            "logs:CreateLogDelivery",
            "logs:DeleteLogDelivery",
            "logs:PutResourcePolicy",
            "logs:DescribeResourcePolicies",
            "logs:DescribeLogGroups"
         ],
         "Resource":[
            "*"
         ],
         "Effect":"Allow"
      }
   ]
}

When actions are permitted on all AWS resources, it's indicated in the policy with a "Resource" setting of "*". This means that the actions are permitted on all AWS resources that each action supports. For example, the action wafv2:PutLoggingConfiguration is supported only for wafv2 logging configuration resources.