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  1. Stackups
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  3. Log Management
  4. Log Management
  5. AWS CloudTrail vs Grafana

AWS CloudTrail vs Grafana

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail
Stacks304
Followers280
Votes14
Grafana
Grafana
Stacks18.4K
Followers14.6K
Votes415
GitHub Stars70.7K
Forks13.1K

AWS CloudTrail vs Grafana: What are the differences?

  1. 1. Key Difference between AWS CloudTrail and Grafana: AWS CloudTrail is a web service that enables governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of your AWS account, whereas Grafana is an open-source analytics and monitoring solution that allows you to visualize and analyze metrics and logs from various data sources.

  2. 2. Key Difference between AWS CloudTrail and Grafana: CloudTrail focuses on providing detailed information about API activity within your AWS account, including the identity of the caller, time of the call, and the request parameters, while Grafana focuses on displaying and analyzing metrics from various data sources, including time series databases like Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Graphite.

  3. 3. Key Difference between AWS CloudTrail and Grafana: CloudTrail is primarily used for security, compliance, governance, and audit purposes, allowing you to track user activity and changes made in your AWS resources, while Grafana is more focused on monitoring and visualizing real-time operational data and metrics to gain insights into system performance and behavior.

  4. 4. Key Difference between AWS CloudTrail and Grafana: CloudTrail logs provide visibility into AWS account activity, allowing you to track actions taken by users, roles, and services within your AWS environment, while Grafana provides a customizable dashboard that consolidates and visualizes data from multiple sources, allowing you to monitor and analyze key metrics and trends.

  5. 5. Key Difference between AWS CloudTrail and Grafana: CloudTrail logs are stored in Amazon S3 and can be analyzed using services like AWS Athena or other analytics tools, while Grafana supports integration with various data sources, allowing you to query and visualize data from sources like databases, APIs, and monitoring systems.

  6. 6. Key Difference between AWS CloudTrail and Grafana: CloudTrail is a fully managed service provided by AWS, which means AWS takes care of infrastructure and maintenance, while Grafana is an open-source tool that requires self-hosting or deployment on a chosen infrastructure.

In Summary, AWS CloudTrail is a service for monitoring and auditing AWS account activity, while Grafana is an open-source platform for visualizing and analyzing metrics and logs from various data sources.

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Advice on AWS CloudTrail, Grafana

StackShare
StackShare

Jun 25, 2019

Needs advice

From a StackShare Community member: “We need better analytics & insights into our Elasticsearch cluster. Grafana, which ships with advanced support for Elasticsearch, looks great but isn’t officially supported/endorsed by Elastic. Kibana, on the other hand, is made and supported by Elastic. I’m wondering what people suggest in this situation."

663k views663k
Comments
Susmita
Susmita

Senior SRE at African Bank

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceonGrafanaGrafana

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

  • Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
  • Able to display automation test results,
  • System monitoring / Nginx API,
  • Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

869k views869k
Comments
Mat
Mat

Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud

Oct 30, 2019

Needs advice

We're looking for a Monitoring and Logging tool. It has to support AWS (mostly 100% serverless, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, API GW, CloudFront, Autora, etc.), as well as Azure and GCP (for now mostly used as pure IaaS, with a lot of cognitive services, and mostly managed DB). Hopefully, something not as expensive as Datadog or New relic, as our SRE team could support the tool inhouse. At the moment, we primarily use CloudWatch for AWS and Pandora for most on-prem.

794k views794k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail
Grafana
Grafana

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.

Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

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.
Create, edit, save & search dashboards;Change column spans and row heights;Drag and drop panels to rearrange;Use InfluxDB or Elasticsearch as dashboard storage;Import & export dashboard (json file);Import dashboard from Graphite;Templating
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
70.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
13.1K
Stacks
304
Stacks
18.4K
Followers
280
Followers
14.6K
Votes
14
Votes
415
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 7
    Very easy setup
  • 3
    Good integrations with 3rd party tools
  • 2
    Backup to S3
  • 2
    Very powerful
Pros
  • 89
    Beautiful
  • 68
    Graphs are interactive
  • 57
    Free
  • 56
    Easy
  • 34
    Nicer than the Graphite web interface
Cons
  • 1
    No interactive query builder
Integrations
Boundary
Boundary
Loggly
Loggly
Splunk Cloud
Splunk Cloud
Graphite
Graphite
InfluxDB
InfluxDB

What are some alternatives to AWS CloudTrail, Grafana?

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.

Kibana

Kibana

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Prometheus

Prometheus

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

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.

Nagios

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

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.

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