Alert Logic vs AWS CloudTrail

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Alert Logic

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AWS CloudTrail

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AWS CloudTrail vs Alert Logic: What are the differences?

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; Alert Logic: Fully managed security-as-a-service and compliance solution. Alert Logic offers SIEMless Threat Management that connects platform, intelligence, & experts to provide the best security and peace of mind for your business.

AWS CloudTrail can be classified as a tool in the "Log Management" category, while Alert Logic is grouped under "Security".

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, Alert Logic provides the following key features:

  • Threat monitoring and visibility
  • Intrusion detection
  • Security analytics
Advice on Alert Logic and AWS CloudTrail
Jigar Shah
Security Software Engineer at Pinterest · | 8 upvotes · 142.2K views

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?

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Replies (5)
Nati Abebe
Recommends
on
AWS ConfigAWS Config

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

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Isaac Povey
Casual Software Engineer at Skedulo · | 6 upvotes · 68.4K views
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TerraformTerraform

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.

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Matthew Rothstein
Recommends
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Security MonkeySecurity Monkey

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.

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Vijayanand Narayanasharma
DevOps/TechOps Consultant at Qantas Loyalty · | 3 upvotes · 59.5K views
Recommends
on
AWS CloudTrailAWS CloudTrail

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.

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Ajay M
Recommends
on
AWS CloudTrailAWS CloudTrail

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.

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Pros of Alert Logic
Pros of AWS CloudTrail
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    • 7
      Very easy setup
    • 3
      Good integrations with 3rd party tools
    • 2
      Very powerful
    • 2
      Backup to S3

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    What is Alert Logic?

    Alert Logic offers SIEMless Threat Management that connects platform, intelligence, & experts to provide the best security and peace of mind for your business.

    What is AWS CloudTrail?

    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.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

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    What tools integrate with Alert Logic?
    What tools integrate with AWS CloudTrail?

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    What are some alternatives to Alert Logic and AWS CloudTrail?
    Splunk
    It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
    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.
    Rapid7
    It is here to help you reduce risk across your entire connected environment so your company can focus on what matters most. Whether you need to easily manage vulnerabilities, monitor for malicious behavior, investigate and shut down attacks, or automate your operations — we have solutions and guidance for you.
    OpenSSL
    It is a robust, commercial-grade, and full-featured toolkit for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols. It is also a general-purpose cryptography library.
    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.
    See all alternatives