AWS CloudTrail vs Stackdriver

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

AWS CloudTrail

318
277
+ 1
14
Stackdriver

331
345
+ 1
67
Add tool

AWS CloudTrail vs Stackdriver: 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; Stackdriver: Monitoring, logging, and diagnostics for applications on Google Cloud Platform and AWS. Google Stackdriver provides powerful monitoring, logging, and diagnostics. It equips you with insight into the health, performance, and availability of cloud-powered applications, enabling you to find and fix issues faster.

AWS CloudTrail can be classified as a tool in the "Log Management" category, while Stackdriver is grouped under "Cloud Monitoring".

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, Stackdriver provides the following key features:

  • Monitoring
  • Logging
  • Diagnostics

"Very easy setup" is the top reason why over 6 developers like AWS CloudTrail, while over 10 developers mention "Monitoring" as the leading cause for choosing Stackdriver.

According to the StackShare community, Stackdriver has a broader approval, being mentioned in 58 company stacks & 18 developers stacks; compared to AWS CloudTrail, which is listed in 38 company stacks and 11 developer stacks.

Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of AWS CloudTrail
Pros of Stackdriver
  • 7
    Very easy setup
  • 3
    Good integrations with 3rd party tools
  • 2
    Very powerful
  • 2
    Backup to S3
  • 19
    Monitoring
  • 11
    Logging
  • 8
    Alerting
  • 7
    Tracing
  • 6
    Uptime Monitoring
  • 5
    Error Reporting
  • 4
    Multi-cloud
  • 3
    Production debugger
  • 2
    Many integrations
  • 1
    Backed by Google
  • 1
    Configured basically with GAE

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of AWS CloudTrail
Cons of Stackdriver
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 2
      Not free

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    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.

    What is Stackdriver?

    Google Stackdriver provides powerful monitoring, logging, and diagnostics. It equips you with insight into the health, performance, and availability of cloud-powered applications, enabling you to find and fix issues faster.

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

    What companies use AWS CloudTrail?
    What companies use Stackdriver?
    See which teams inside your own company are using AWS CloudTrail or Stackdriver.
    Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with AWS CloudTrail?
    What tools integrate with Stackdriver?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    What are some alternatives to AWS CloudTrail and Stackdriver?
    AWS Config
    AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides you with an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance. With AWS Config you can discover existing AWS resources, export a complete inventory of your AWS resources with all configuration details, and determine how a resource was configured at any point in time. These capabilities enable compliance auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.
    AWS X-Ray
    It helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With this, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. It provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components.
    Splunk
    It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
    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.
    Logback
    It is intended as a successor to the popular log4j project. It is divided into three modules, logback-core, logback-classic and logback-access. The logback-core module lays the groundwork for the other two modules, logback-classic natively implements the SLF4J API so that you can readily switch back and forth between logback and other logging frameworks and logback-access module integrates with Servlet containers, such as Tomcat and Jetty, to provide HTTP-access log functionality.
    See all alternatives