AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Category: AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail Best Practices

September 8, 2021: HAQM Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to HAQM OpenSearch Service. See details. AWS CloudTrail gives you a history of AWS calls for your account, including API calls made through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, and command line tools. As a result, you can identify: Which users and accounts called AWS APIs […]

Figure 1: CloudTrail Process Flow

How to optimize AWS CloudTrail costs by using advanced event selectors

AWS CloudTrail can be used for security, monitoring restricted API calls, notification of threshold breaches, operational issues, filtering mechanisms for isolating data, faster root cause identification, and speedy resolution. CloudTrail can also be used for various compliance and governance controls, by helping you achieve compliance by logging API calls and changes to resources. Event selectors […]

Best practices for creating and managing sandbox accounts in AWS

Organizations use multiple environments, each with different security and compliance controls, as part of their deployment pipeline. Following the principle of least privilege, production environments have the most restrictive security and compliance controls. They tightly limit who can access the environment and which actions each user (or principal) can perform. Development and test environments also […]

Viewing permission issues with service-linked roles

Each AWS service requires explicit access to resources, endpoints, and objects that reside in the domain of another service. This is referred to as the permission boundary. Services like AWS Config, HAQM Macie, and AWS GuardDuty require an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role that grants access to resources outside of its control. Understanding […]

AWS Management and Governance at Re:Invent 2020

AWS re:Invent is always an exciting time of the year to engage with our customers to learn, and share information about our services and features. Due to the current pandemic, re:Invent is pivoting to a free and virtual format presented across 3 weeks from November 30 to December 18 this year. Yes, you read that […]

How BBVA automated responses through event management at scale

In this blog post, we describe how BBVA USA, a financial institution that ranks among the top 25 largest commercial banks, used AWS services to implement event management at scale and centralize its event response. Generally speaking, security compliance in a monolithic environment is easier to monitor and enforce when a small number of hands […]

Improve governance and business agility using AWS Management and Governance videos – part 2

This blog post highlights newly published videos on the AWS Management and Governance YouTube channel that help you enable, provision, and operate your AWS environments effectively. The first part of this blog series was published last spring. The objective of these video-based, hands-on solutions is to enable you to innovate faster while maintaining control over […]

How BBVA USA delivered security and governance at scale using management tools

As BBVA USA began its digital transformation journey, the security operations team had to improve its processes around provisioning and baselining of AWS accounts. The demand for new AWS accounts continued to increase from multiple application teams within the bank. In an effort to standardize new accounts within the enterprise, BBVA USA built an automated […]

Visualizing AWS CloudTrail Events using Kibana

In this blog post you learn how to visualize AWS CloudTrail events, near real time, using Kibana. This solution is useful if you use an ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack to aggregate logs from all your systems and applications, analyze these logs, and create visualizations for application and infrastructure monitoring. This solution is also useful […]