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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Log Management
  4. Log Management
  5. AWS CloudTrail vs Fluentd

AWS CloudTrail vs Fluentd

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail
Stacks304
Followers280
Votes14
Fluentd
Fluentd
Stacks630
Followers688
Votes39
GitHub Stars13.4K
Forks1.4K

AWS CloudTrail vs Fluentd: What are the differences?

  1. Data Source: AWS CloudTrail is specifically designed for auditing AWS services and API calls, while Fluentd is a general-purpose data collector that can gather log data from various sources such as databases, systems, and applications.

  2. Integration with AWS Services: AWS CloudTrail seamlessly integrates with other AWS services for monitoring and analyzing API activity, configuration changes, and resource tracking, whereas Fluentd requires additional configuration and plugins to integrate with AWS services.

  3. Functionality: AWS CloudTrail primarily focuses on recording API activity for compliance, security, and operational insights, whereas Fluentd can be customized for various data processing tasks such as data aggregation, filtering, and transformation.

  4. Managed Service vs. Open Source: AWS CloudTrail is a managed service provided by AWS, offering easy setup, maintenance, and scalability, while Fluentd is an open-source software that requires users to manage and maintain their deployment.

  5. Cost Structure: AWS CloudTrail follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on the volume of events recorded, while Fluentd has no direct cost but may incur expenses for infrastructure, maintenance, and support in a self-hosted deployment.

  6. Community Support: Fluentd has a large community of users and contributors who provide extensive support, documentation, and plugins for various data sources and destinations, whereas AWS CloudTrail's support is primarily provided by AWS with limited customization options.

In Summary, AWS CloudTrail is a managed service with a focus on auditing AWS services, while Fluentd is an open-source data collector with broader customization capabilities.

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Detailed Comparison

AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail
Fluentd
Fluentd

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.

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.

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.
Open source; Flexible; Minimum resources; Reliable
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
13.4K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
1.4K
Stacks
304
Stacks
630
Followers
280
Followers
688
Votes
14
Votes
39
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 7
    Very easy setup
  • 3
    Good integrations with 3rd party tools
  • 2
    Backup to S3
  • 2
    Very powerful
Pros
  • 11
    Open-source
  • 10
    Great for Kubernetes node container log forwarding
  • 9
    Easy
  • 9
    Lightweight
Integrations
Boundary
Boundary
Loggly
Loggly
Splunk Cloud
Splunk Cloud
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to AWS CloudTrail, Fluentd?

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.

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.

Splunk

Splunk

It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.

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