StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Log Management
  4. Log Management
  5. AWS CloudTrail vs Rsyslog

AWS CloudTrail vs Rsyslog

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail
Stacks304
Followers280
Votes14
Rsyslog
Rsyslog
Stacks37
Followers75
Votes0
GitHub Stars2.2K
Forks700

AWS CloudTrail vs Rsyslog: What are the differences?

Key Differences between AWS CloudTrail and Rsyslog

In this article, we will explore the key differences between AWS CloudTrail and Rsyslog. CloudTrail is a service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables auditing, compliance, and governance of the AWS account activity. On the other hand, Rsyslog is an open-source software tool that provides reliable and secure log processing on Unix-like systems.

  1. Data source: The primary difference between AWS CloudTrail and Rsyslog is the source of the data they handle. CloudTrail collects and monitors API activity and other actions performed in the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command-line tools, and other AWS services. In contrast, Rsyslog is designed to process and manage log messages from various sources on Unix-like systems, including local log files, network devices, and applications.

  2. Storage and management: AWS CloudTrail stores the collected logs in an S3 bucket, which allows for easy storage, retrieval, and analysis using other AWS services like Amazon Athena and Amazon CloudWatch. It also provides built-in log management features like log file encryption, log file integrity validation, and log file archiving. Rsyslog, on the other hand, usually stores log messages locally on the system it is installed on and offers log rotation and compression options for managing log files.

  3. Integration and compatibility: AWS CloudTrail is tightly integrated with other AWS services and can be easily configured to send logs to centralized services like Amazon CloudWatch Logs or Amazon S3 for further processing and analysis. It also provides integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for controlling access to the logs. Rsyslog, on the other hand, can integrate with various third-party tools and services for log analysis and management, including Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK stack).

  4. Scalability and availability: AWS CloudTrail is a fully managed service provided by AWS, which means it automatically scales and handles the infrastructure required for collecting and managing the logs. It offers high availability and durability through data replication across multiple availability zones. Rsyslog's scalability and availability depend on the underlying system it is installed on and the resources allocated to it.

  5. Security and compliance: AWS CloudTrail offers features like log file encryption and integrity validation to ensure the security and tamper-proof nature of the logs. It also provides integration with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for further encryption of the log files. Rsyslog offers encryption options for securing log messages during transport and supports various industry-standard security protocols like TLS and SSL.

  6. Pricing: AWS CloudTrail pricing is based on the number of events logged and stored, as well as any additional data transfer or analysis required. Rsyslog, being an open-source tool, is free to use, but the cost of infrastructure and resources required to run it may vary depending on the scale and complexity of the log management implementation.

In summary, AWS CloudTrail is a specialized service designed for monitoring and auditing AWS account activity, while Rsyslog is a versatile open-source tool for log processing and management on Unix-like systems.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on AWS CloudTrail, Rsyslog

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
Rsyslog
Rsyslog

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.

It offers high-performance, great security features and a modular design. It is able to accept inputs from a wide variety of sources, transform them, and output to the results to diverse destinations.

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.
Multi-threading; TCP, SSL, TLS, RELP; MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and more; Filter any part of syslog message;
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
2.2K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
700
Stacks
304
Stacks
37
Followers
280
Followers
75
Votes
14
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 7
    Very easy setup
  • 3
    Good integrations with 3rd party tools
  • 2
    Very powerful
  • 2
    Backup to S3
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Boundary
Boundary
Loggly
Loggly
Splunk Cloud
Splunk Cloud
Oracle
Oracle
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
Splunk
Splunk
MySQL
MySQL

What are some alternatives to AWS CloudTrail, Rsyslog?

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.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana