Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
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.
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?
For continuous monitoring and detecting unusual configuration changes, I would suggest you look into AWS Config.
AWS Config enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. Here is a list of supported AWS resources types and resource relationships with AWS Config https://docs.aws.amazon.com/config/latest/developerguide/resource-config-reference.html
Also as of Nov, 2019 - AWS Config launches support for third-party resources. You can now publish the configuration of third-party resources, such as GitHub repositories, Microsoft Active Directory resources, or any on-premises server into AWS Config using the new API. Here is more detail: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/config/latest/developerguide/customresources.html
If you have multiple AWS Account in your organization and want to detect changes there: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/config/latest/developerguide/aggregate-data.html
Lastly, if you already use Splunk Cloud in your enterprise and are looking for a consolidated view then, AWS Config is supported by Splunk Cloud as per their documentation too. https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/Splunk-Inc-Splunk-Cloud/B06XK299KV https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/Splunk-Inc-Splunk-Cloud/B06XK299KV
While it won't detect events as they happen a good stop gap would be to define your infrastructure config using terraform. You can then periodically run the terraform config against your environment and alert if there are any changes.
Consider using a combination of Netflix Security Monkey and AWS Guard Duty.
You can achieve automated detection and alerting, as well as automated recovery based on policies with these tools.
For instance, you could detect SecurityGroup rule changes that allow unrestricted egress from EC2 instances and then revert those changes automatically.
It's unclear from your post whether you want to detect events within the Splunk Cloud infrastructure or if you want to detect events indicated in data going to Splunk using the Splunk capabilities. If the latter, then Splunk has extremely rich capabilities in their query language and integrated alerting functions. With Splunk you can also run arbitrary Python scripts in response to certain events, so what you can't analyze and alert on with native functionality or plugins, you could write code to achieve.
Well there are clear advantages of using either tools, it all boils down to what exactly are you trying to achieve with this i.e do you want to proactive monitoring or do you want debug an incident/issue. Splunk definitely is superior in terms of proactively monitoring your logs for unusal events, but getting the cloudtrail logs across to splunk would require some not so straight forward setup (Splunk has a blueprint for this setup which uses AWS kinesis/Firehose). Cloudtrail on the other had is available out of the box from AWS, the setup is quite simple and straight forward. But analysing the log could require you setup Glue crawlers and you might have to use AWS Athena to run SQL Like query.
Refer: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/cloudtrail-logs.html
In my personal experience the cost/effort involved in setting up splunk is not worth it for smaller workloads, whereas the AWS Cloudtrail/Glue/Athena would be less expensive setup(comparatively).
Alternatively you could look at something like sumologic, which has better integration with cloudtrail as opposed to splunk. Hope that helps.
I'd recommend using CloudTrail, it helped me a lot. But depending on your situation I'd recommed building a custom solution(like aws amazon-ssm-agent) which on configuration change makes an API call and logs them in grafana or kibana.
Pros of Amazon Kinesis
- Scalable9
Pros of AWS CloudTrail
- Very easy setup7
- Good integrations with 3rd party tools3
- Very powerful2
- Backup to S32
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Amazon Kinesis
- Cost3