AWS CloudTrail vs Prometheus: 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; Prometheus: An open-source service monitoring system and time series database, developed by SoundCloud. 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.
AWS CloudTrail and Prometheus are primarily classified as "Log Management" and "Monitoring" tools respectively.
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, Prometheus provides the following key features:
- a multi-dimensional data model (timeseries defined by metric name and set of key/value dimensions)
- a flexible query language to leverage this dimensionality
- no dependency on distributed storage
"Very easy setup" is the primary reason why developers consider AWS CloudTrail over the competitors, whereas "Powerful easy to use monitoring" was stated as the key factor in picking Prometheus.
Prometheus is an open source tool with 25K GitHub stars and 3.55K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Prometheus's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Prometheus has a broader approval, being mentioned in 243 company stacks & 85 developers stacks; compared to AWS CloudTrail, which is listed in 38 company stacks and 11 developer stacks.
