AWS CloudTrail vs Fluentd: What are the differences?

Developers describe AWS CloudTrail as "Record AWS API calls for your account and have log files delivered to you". 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. On the other hand, Fluentd is detailed as "Unified logging layer". 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.

AWS CloudTrail and Fluentd can be primarily classified as "Log Management" tools.

Some of the features offered by AWS CloudTrail are:

• 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

On the other hand, Fluentd provides the following key features:

• Open source
• Flexible
• Minimum resources

Fluentd is an open source tool with 7.98K GitHub stars and 930 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Fluentd's open source repository on GitHub.

9GAG, Geocodio, and Repro are some of the popular companies that use Fluentd, whereas AWS CloudTrail is used by Netflix, Slack, and Seat Pagine Gialle. Fluentd has a broader approval, being mentioned in 64 company stacks & 18 developers stacks; compared to AWS CloudTrail, which is listed in 37 company stacks and 11 developer stacks.