AWS CloudTrail vs Logentries: What are the differences?

What is AWS CloudTrail? 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.

What is Logentries? Real-time log management and analytics built for the cloud. 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.

AWS CloudTrail and Logentries can be categorized 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, Logentries provides the following key features:

• Logs as Metrics - Extract field level values, analyze them using powerful search functions, and visualize them with detailed dashboards.
• Dynamic Log Correlation - Dynamically group and correlate your logs in a single dashboard, or aggregate logs from a particular system to give an end-to-end view.
• Live Tail - View your streaming logs in real-time and highlight important events to easily see errors or exceptions in your live data.

"Very easy setup" is the top reason why over 6 developers like AWS CloudTrail, while over 31 developers mention "Log search" as the leading cause for choosing Logentries.

PedidosYa, Accenture, and Movielala are some of the popular companies that use Logentries, whereas AWS CloudTrail is used by Netflix, Slack, and Seat Pagine Gialle. Logentries has a broader approval, being mentioned in 136 company stacks & 18 developers stacks; compared to AWS CloudTrail, which is listed in 38 company stacks and 11 developer stacks.