AWS CloudTrail vs Logstash: What are the differences?

Developers describe AWS CloudTrail as "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. On the other hand, Logstash is detailed as "Collect, Parse, & Enrich Data". 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.

AWS CloudTrail and Logstash can be categorized as "Log Management" tools.

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, Logstash provides the following key features:

• Centralize data processing of all types
• Normalize varying schema and formats
• Quickly extend to custom log formats

"Very easy setup" is the primary reason why developers consider AWS CloudTrail over the competitors, whereas "Free" was stated as the key factor in picking Logstash.

Logstash is an open source tool with 10.3K GitHub stars and 2.78K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Logstash's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Logstash has a broader approval, being mentioned in 561 company stacks & 278 developers stacks; compared to AWS CloudTrail, which is listed in 38 company stacks and 11 developer stacks.