AWS CloudTrail Reviews & Insights

Mainly we're using it for an audit trail of all actions done in AWS CloudTrail and for user activity of course. Moreover, our Dev-Ops were using it to debug AWS services, especially understanding what and why went wrong during the AWS CloudTrail setup or changes. The scope is mainly audit/logging of API calls and monitoring, mainly detecting unusual or suspicious activities.

Most probably it would be suitable for Finance industries, where security is at the head of the table. However, in our case for E-commerce, it's also quite suitable, since we have quite a significant amount of data and usage of AWS services. Especially with usage of AWS services, AWS CloudTrail comes into play as a heavy plus. For instance, troubleshooting any issues in AWS services is really nice.

Therefore, it would be less appropriate with a small amount of AWS service usage and some basic web hosting.

AWS CloudTrail is used for governance, compliance and investigating API usage across all of our AWS accounts.
Every action that is taken by a user or script is an API call so this is logged to [AWS] Cloudtrail. This is critical in keeping a close eye on what users are doing in AWS.

It is necessary to enable [AWS] Cloudtrail when using AWS in a production environment, otherwise you will not have any idea what is happening within your accounts. Third party monitoring applications will all require [AWS] CloudTrail to be enabled as well. I would not recommend it solely as a monitoring tool, to get the most out of it you must send the logs elsewhere. Either to Cloudwatch logs or a third party product.

AWS CloudTrail is essential to our AWS architecture design. It is used by every single account within our AWS Organization (all accounts within the company). From the moment a child account is added to our organization, AWS CloudTrail is baked in and enforced for its entire lifespan. The business problem that it solves is mainly to satisfy requirements for our security and governance teams. On top of the security features, it allows the Cloud Admins to help our users troubleshoot and backtrack when issues arise.

Highly recommended. This is an essential service for any Cloud solution. There are probably other products that will accomplish these same objectives but AWS CloudTrail being an integrated native solution is very hard to beat. AWS CloudTrail can also be integrated with SNS, SQS and passed on-prem to data lakes or visualization tools.

We have adopted CloudTrail in order to facilitate our log management. The level of details is so good and it has been used a lot to make our product even better. We mainly use it to monitor our API activities and based on that we have some reports to understand better our usage.

If you have a system mainly based on API's or at least want to understand better your API's usage, you definitely should adopt CloudTrail, of course, it's much useful when your entire network is on AWS and it can be a powered tool to have an overview of everything that is going on around.