Week 5: Logging and Monitoring
Exploring AWS logging and monitoring through hands-on labs, including CloudTrail, CloudWatch Logs Insights, and EC2 resource management.
Series: AWS Cloud Security (6 articles)
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- 5Week 5: Logging and Monitoring This article
As I continue my cloud engineering journey, one important lesson I have learned is that securing a cloud environment goes beyond controlling who can access it. We also need visibility into what happens within that environment.
This week, I explored logging and monitoring in AWS and how they contribute to security, troubleshooting, and incident investigation.
Here are some key concepts I learned:
Logging: is the collection and recording of activities and event data, and there are different types of logged information and they include: Date and Time of event, Originating location of request, Identity of resources accessed. Logging is useful for troubleshooting, auditing, recordkeeping and incidence response and remediation.
Monitoring: is the continuous verification of the security and performance of your resources, applications and data. there are several AWS services that gives us visibility to spot issues and they are:
- AWS CloudTrail
- Amazon CloudWatch
- Amazon EventBridge
- AWS X-Ray
I also Learnt about AWS CloudTrail, CloudTrail Records account activity, including API actions performed by users, roles, and AWS services. It helps answer important questions such as who performed an action, what happened, and when it occurred.
Amazon CloudWatch: Provides monitoring capabilities through metrics, logs, and alarms, helping us observe resource performance and identify conditions that require attention.
Services with Built in Logging
- Amazon S3: These logs are useful in a number of ways. From providing information during a security and access audit to providing insights about your customer base.
- Amazon VPC: VPC logs can be captured at VPC, subnet or individual network interface level. They can be published to cloudwatch or S3 and because they are collected outside of the network transversal path, they don’t affect network performance.
- Elastic Load Balancer: ELB access logs capture detailed information about requests sent to your load balancer. Use access logs to analyze traffic patterns and for troubleshooting. ELB captures, compresses, and stores logs in a specified S3 bucket.
Best Practices for Logging and Monitoring include:
- Define all Organizational reuirements for logs, alerts and metrics.
- Configure service and application logging throughout your workload.
- Analyze your logs centrally.
Additional AWS services for Logging and Monitoring Include:
- AWS Trusted Advisor: provides recommendations that help you follow AWS best practices, Trusted Advisor evaluates your account by using checks based on five categories of AWS best practices. The checks identify ways to optimize your AWS infrastructure, improve security and performance, reduce costs, and monitor service quotas.
- AWS Trusted Advisor: is a serverless event bus service that makes it easier for you to build event driven applications by connecting those applications with data from a variety of sources.
- AWS Security Hub: aggregates security alerts from various AWS services and third party partner products, and presents them in a standardized format, making it easier for you to act on the alerts.
Connecting Theory to Practice
During my hands-on AWS Security Groups lab, I also worked with EC2 instance management and EBS snapshots. One of the tasks involved querying CloudTrail logs using CloudWatch Logs Insights.
This was an important connection between theory and practice. Logging preserves records of activity, while log queries help us investigate those records and make sense of what happened in our environment.
The lab also reinforced the importance of controlling network traffic through security groups and understanding how resource management and data recovery fit into cloud operations.
💡 My Key Takeaway
Preventive controls help reduce security risks, but visibility helps us understand what is happening and investigate when something goes wrong.
For me, this is an important part of growing as a cloud engineer: learning not just how to deploy cloud resources, but also how to monitor, secure, troubleshoot, and manage them responsibly.
I look forward to building on these skills as I continue exploring AWS and developing my practical cloud engineering knowledge.
Series: AWS Cloud Security (6 articles)
- …
- 5Week 5: Logging and Monitoring This article
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