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AWS CloudTrail vs AWS X-Ray: What are the differences?
AWS CloudTrail and AWS X-Ray are two services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that help in monitoring and troubleshooting applications running on AWS. While both services have similarities, there are several key differences between the two.
Data Collection: AWS CloudTrail focuses on capturing event history related to AWS API calls made by or on behalf of an AWS account. It helps in auditing and tracking actions that occur within the AWS infrastructure. On the other hand, AWS X-Ray is specifically designed for distributed applications and captures data about requests as they travel through the application and across services boundaries.
Level of Detail: CloudTrail provides detailed information about AWS API calls, including the identity of the caller, time of the API call, request parameters, and response elements. It logs events from all AWS services, providing a comprehensive audit trail. X-Ray collects detailed tracing data about requests and provides insights into how requests flow through the application, including response time, latency, and errors.
Use Case: CloudTrail is primarily used for compliance, auditing, and security purposes. It helps track who did what and when in AWS accounts, aiding in security analyses, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting operational issues. X-Ray, on the other hand, is designed for performance optimization and troubleshooting in distributed applications. It provides a visual representation of the application's architecture and helps identify performance bottlenecks and latencies.
Integration with AWS Services: CloudTrail integrates seamlessly with various AWS services, including AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, and AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). It can also be integrated with AWS CloudWatch, AWS Config, and AWS Lambda for enhanced monitoring and automation. X-Ray integrates with AWS Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, ECS, and other AWS services to automatically trace requests as they pass through these services. It provides valuable insights into how different services contribute to the overall response time of an application.
Visualization and Analytics: CloudTrail provides the ability to search, filter, and visualize the event history using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or APIs. It also supports CloudTrail Insights, which uses machine learning algorithms to detect unusual activity and potential security threats. X-Ray provides a rich set of visualization and analytical tools to understand how requests flow through the application. It allows developers to view traces, analyze performance bottlenecks, and identify trends to optimize application performance.
Pricing Model: CloudTrail pricing is based on the number of events recorded and the volume of data delivered, with a free tier available. Additional costs may be incurred if the CloudTrail data needs to be stored for an extended period. X-Ray pricing is based on the number of traces analyzed, with a free tier available. Additional charges may apply if traces exceed the free tier limits.
In summary, AWS CloudTrail focuses on capturing event history for auditing and security purposes, while AWS X-Ray is designed for distributed application performance optimization and troubleshooting. CloudTrail provides comprehensive auditing capabilities, while X-Ray offers detailed insights into request flow and performance optimization.
We would like to detect unusual config changes that can potentially cause production outage.
Such as, SecurityGroup new allow/deny rule, AuthZ policy change, Secret key/certificate rotation, IP subnet add/drop. The problem is the source of all of these activities is different, i.e., AWS IAM, Amazon EC2, internal prod services, envoy sidecar, etc.
Which of the technology would be best suitable to detect only IMP events (not all activity) from various sources all workload running on AWS and also Splunk Cloud?
For continuous monitoring and detecting unusual configuration changes, I would suggest you look into AWS Config.
AWS Config enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. Here is a list of supported AWS resources types and resource relationships with AWS Config https://docs.aws.amazon.com/config/latest/developerguide/resource-config-reference.html
Also as of Nov, 2019 - AWS Config launches support for third-party resources. You can now publish the configuration of third-party resources, such as GitHub repositories, Microsoft Active Directory resources, or any on-premises server into AWS Config using the new API. Here is more detail: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/config/latest/developerguide/customresources.html
If you have multiple AWS Account in your organization and want to detect changes there: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/config/latest/developerguide/aggregate-data.html
Lastly, if you already use Splunk Cloud in your enterprise and are looking for a consolidated view then, AWS Config is supported by Splunk Cloud as per their documentation too. https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/Splunk-Inc-Splunk-Cloud/B06XK299KV https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/Splunk-Inc-Splunk-Cloud/B06XK299KV
While it won't detect events as they happen a good stop gap would be to define your infrastructure config using terraform. You can then periodically run the terraform config against your environment and alert if there are any changes.
Consider using a combination of Netflix Security Monkey and AWS Guard Duty.
You can achieve automated detection and alerting, as well as automated recovery based on policies with these tools.
For instance, you could detect SecurityGroup rule changes that allow unrestricted egress from EC2 instances and then revert those changes automatically.
It's unclear from your post whether you want to detect events within the Splunk Cloud infrastructure or if you want to detect events indicated in data going to Splunk using the Splunk capabilities. If the latter, then Splunk has extremely rich capabilities in their query language and integrated alerting functions. With Splunk you can also run arbitrary Python scripts in response to certain events, so what you can't analyze and alert on with native functionality or plugins, you could write code to achieve.
Well there are clear advantages of using either tools, it all boils down to what exactly are you trying to achieve with this i.e do you want to proactive monitoring or do you want debug an incident/issue. Splunk definitely is superior in terms of proactively monitoring your logs for unusal events, but getting the cloudtrail logs across to splunk would require some not so straight forward setup (Splunk has a blueprint for this setup which uses AWS kinesis/Firehose). Cloudtrail on the other had is available out of the box from AWS, the setup is quite simple and straight forward. But analysing the log could require you setup Glue crawlers and you might have to use AWS Athena to run SQL Like query.
Refer: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/cloudtrail-logs.html
In my personal experience the cost/effort involved in setting up splunk is not worth it for smaller workloads, whereas the AWS Cloudtrail/Glue/Athena would be less expensive setup(comparatively).
Alternatively you could look at something like sumologic, which has better integration with cloudtrail as opposed to splunk. Hope that helps.
I'd recommend using CloudTrail, it helped me a lot. But depending on your situation I'd recommed building a custom solution(like aws amazon-ssm-agent) which on configuration change makes an API call and logs them in grafana or kibana.
Pros of AWS CloudTrail
- Very easy setup7
- Good integrations with 3rd party tools3
- Very powerful2
- Backup to S32
