A vital feature of any IT environment is the ability to record a detailed audit log of the changes made, who made the changes, and when they were made. Audits are a requirement of many compliance standards, and are the best practice to ensure that security breaches can be detected and investigated. AWS CloudTrail provides this functionality by allowing you to set up trails that record specific activity within your account.
We're now going to show you how to set up CloudTrail in your AWS account. Once CloudTrail has been enabled, it will start to record all of the API calls made in your account to the AWS service, and then deliver them to you as log files in an S3 bucket.
When we talk about API calls, we mean things such as the following:
- Actions performed in the AWS console.
- Calls made to AWS APIs using the CLI or SDKs.
- Calls made on your behalf by AWS services...