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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Log Management
  4. Log Management
  5. AWS CloudTrail vs Amazon Kinesis

AWS CloudTrail vs Amazon Kinesis

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail
Stacks304
Followers280
Votes14
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Kinesis
Stacks796
Followers604
Votes9

AWS CloudTrail vs Amazon Kinesis: What are the differences?

Key Differences between AWS CloudTrail and Amazon Kinesis

1. AWS CloudTrail: AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of AWS account activity. It provides a detailed history of all API calls made within an AWS account, including who made the call, when it was made, and which resources were affected.

2. Amazon Kinesis: Amazon Kinesis is a fully managed service that makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data from various sources such as website clickstreams, IoT devices, social media, and more. It enables the processing of large amounts of data to generate real-time insights.

3. CloudTrail Focus: The main focus of AWS CloudTrail is to provide a comprehensive record and monitoring of all API activity within an AWS account. It captures both management events and data events, allowing organizations to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, troubleshoot operational issues, and detect unauthorized activity.

4. Kinesis Focus: On the other hand, Amazon Kinesis is primarily designed for real-time data streaming and processing. It allows organizations to ingest, store, and process large-scale data streams in real-time, enabling actions such as real-time analytics, machine learning, and alerting.

5. Event Data vs. Stream Data: CloudTrail captures API events and generates logs in JSON format, storing them in an S3 bucket or sending them to CloudWatch Logs. It provides detailed information about actions performed within the AWS environment. In contrast, Kinesis deals with stream data, which is continuous, ordered, and scalable. It can handle massive amounts of data in real-time to enable real-time application processing.

6. Use Cases: AWS CloudTrail is commonly used for security and compliance purposes, as it allows organizations to monitor and track all access and changes made within their AWS accounts. It is essential for forensic investigations, audit trail analysis, and compliance reporting. On the other hand, Amazon Kinesis is widely used for real-time analytics, streaming data processing, and building real-time applications that require continuous ingestion, processing, and analysis of data.

In Summary, CloudTrail focuses on capturing and monitoring API activity within an AWS account for security and compliance purposes, while Kinesis is designed for real-time data streaming and processing for real-time analytics and application development.

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Advice on AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Kinesis

Jigar
Jigar

Security Software Engineer at Cisco

Jul 2, 2020

Needs adviceonAWS IAMAWS IAMAmazon EC2Amazon EC2Splunk CloudSplunk Cloud

We would like to detect unusual config changes that can potentially cause production outage.

Such as, SecurityGroup new allow/deny rule, AuthZ policy change, Secret key/certificate rotation, IP subnet add/drop. The problem is the source of all of these activities is different, i.e., AWS IAM, Amazon EC2, internal prod services, envoy sidecar, etc.

Which of the technology would be best suitable to detect only IMP events (not all activity) from various sources all workload running on AWS and also Splunk Cloud?

168k views168k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Kinesis

With CloudTrail, you can get a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made via the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level AWS services (such as AWS CloudFormation). The AWS API call history produced by CloudTrail enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service.

Amazon Kinesis can collect and process hundreds of gigabytes of data per second from hundreds of thousands of sources, allowing you to easily write applications that process information in real-time, from sources such as web site click-streams, marketing and financial information, manufacturing instrumentation and social media, and operational logs and metering data.

Increased Visibility- CloudTrail provides increased visibility into your user activity by recording AWS API calls. You can answer questions such as, what actions did a given user take over a given time period? For a given resource, which user has taken actions on it over a given time period? What is the source IP address of a given activity? Which activities failed due to inadequate permissions?;Durable and Inexpensive Log File Storage- CloudTrail uses Amazon S3 for log file storage and delivery, so log files are stored durably and inexpensively. You can use Amazon S3 lifecycle configuration rules to further reduce storage costs. For example, you can define rules to automatically delete old log files or archive them to Amazon Glacier for additional savings.;Easy Administration- CloudTrail is a fully managed service; you simply turn on CloudTrail for your account using the AWS Management Console, the Command Line Interface, or the CloudTrail SDK and start receiving CloudTrail log files in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket that you specify.;Reliable- CloudTrail continuously transports events from AWS services using a highly available and fault tolerant processing pipeline.;Timely Delivery- CloudTrail typically delivers events within 15 minutes of the API call.;Log File Aggregation- CloudTrail can be configured to aggregate log files across multiple accounts and regions so that log files are delivered to a single bucket. Please refer to the of the AWS CloudTrail User Guide for detailed instructions.;Notifications for Log File Delivery- CloudTrail can be configured to publish a notification for each log file delivered, thus enabling you to automatically take action upon log file delivery. CloudTrail uses the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) for notifications.;Choice of Partner Solutions- Multiple partners including AlertLogic, Boundary, Loggly, Splunk and Sumologic offer integrated solutions to analyze CloudTrail log files. These solutions include features like change tracking, troubleshooting, and security analysis.
Real-time Processing- Amazon Kinesis enables you to collect and analyze information in real-time, allowing you to answer questions about the current state of your data, from inventory levels to stock trade frequencies, rather than having to wait for an out-of-date report;Easy to use- You can create a new stream, set the throughput requirements, and start streaming data quickly and easily. Amazon Kinesis automatically provisions and manages the storage required to reliably and durably collect your data stream;High throughput. Elastic.- Amazon Kinesis seamlessly scales to match the data throughput rate and volume of your data, from megabytes to terabytes per hour. Amazon Kinesis will scale up or down based on your needs;Integrate with Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB- With Amazon Kinesis, you can reliably collect, process, and transform all of your data in real-time before delivering it to data stores of your choice, where it can be used by existing or new applications. Connectors enable integration with Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB;Build Kinesis Applications- Amazon Kinesis provides developers with client libraries that enable the design and operation of real-time data processing applications. Just add the Amazon Kinesis Client Library to your Java application and it will be notified when new data is available for processing;Low Cost- Amazon Kinesis is cost-efficient for workloads of any scale. You can pay as you go, and you’ll only pay for the resources you use. You can get started by provisioning low throughput streams, and only pay a low hourly rate for the throughput you need
Statistics
Stacks
304
Stacks
796
Followers
280
Followers
604
Votes
14
Votes
9
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 7
    Very easy setup
  • 3
    Good integrations with 3rd party tools
  • 2
    Very powerful
  • 2
    Backup to S3
Pros
  • 9
    Scalable
Cons
  • 3
    Cost
Integrations
Boundary
Boundary
Loggly
Loggly
Splunk Cloud
Splunk Cloud
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Kinesis?

Papertrail

Papertrail

Papertrail helps detect, resolve, and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages. Papertrail's practicality comes from our own experience as sysadmins, developers, and entrepreneurs.

Logmatic

Logmatic

Get a clear overview of what is happening across your distributed environments, and spot the needle in the haystack in no time. Build dynamic analyses and identify improvements for your software, your user experience and your business.

Loggly

Loggly

It is a SaaS solution to manage your log data. There is nothing to install and updates are automatically applied to your Loggly subdomain.

Logentries

Logentries

Logentries makes machine-generated log data easily accessible to IT operations, development, and business analysis teams of all sizes. With the broadest platform support and an open API, Logentries brings the value of log-level data to any system, to any team member, and to a community of more than 25,000 worldwide users.

Logstash

Logstash

Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.

Graylog

Graylog

Centralize and aggregate all your log files for 100% visibility. Use our powerful query language to search through terabytes of log data to discover and analyze important information.

Sematext

Sematext

Sematext pulls together performance monitoring, logs, user experience and synthetic monitoring that tools organizations need to troubleshoot performance issues faster.

Fluentd

Fluentd

Fluentd collects events from various data sources and writes them to files, RDBMS, NoSQL, IaaS, SaaS, Hadoop and so on. Fluentd helps you unify your logging infrastructure.

ELK

ELK

It is the acronym for three open source projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Elasticsearch is a search and analytics engine. Logstash is a server‑side data processing pipeline that ingests data from multiple sources simultaneously, transforms it, and then sends it to a "stash" like Elasticsearch. Kibana lets users visualize data with charts and graphs in Elasticsearch.

Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic

Cloud-based machine data analytics platform that enables companies to proactively identify availability and performance issues in their infrastructure, improve their security posture and enhance application rollouts. Companies using Sumo Logic reduce their mean-time-to-resolution by 50% and can save hundreds of thousands of dollars, annually. Customers include Netflix, Medallia, Orange, and GoGo Inflight.

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