CloudWatch & CloudTrail: Monitoring & Auditing

Metrics, alarms, centralized log groups, and API governance audit trails

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Observability and security governance in AWS rely on Amazon CloudWatch for performance metrics and alarms, and AWS CloudTrail for recording every API call made across the account.

CloudWatch vs CloudTrail

Amazon CloudWatch: Performance monitoring. Tracks CPU utilization, memory metrics, disk I/O, error rates, and centralized application logs. Can trigger alarms and auto-remediation actions.

AWS CloudTrail: Security auditing and compliance. Records every API call made in the account (who did what, when, from which IP address, and using which credentials). Essential for incident response.

CloudWatch Metric Alarm Concept

Try It Yourself »

# CloudWatch Alarm Trigger:
Metric: AWS/EC2 CPUUtilization
Statistic: Average
Threshold: > 80% for 2 consecutive periods of 5 minutes
Action: Send SNS notification to DevOps team & Trigger Auto Scaling scale-out

Alarms trigger automated scaling or paging notifications when thresholds breach.

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Test Yourself With Exercise

+15 XP

Which AWS service logs every administrative action and API request made across your AWS account for compliance and security auditing?

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