Introduction

In this article, we will take a look into the differences between Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail.

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), IT managers, and product owners. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events. You can use CloudWatch to detect anomalous behavior in your environments, set alarms, visualize logs and metrics side by side, take automated actions, troubleshoot issues, and discover insights to keep your applications running smoothly.

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What is AWS CloudTrail?

AWS CloudTrail is an AWS service that helps you enable governance, compliance, operational, and risk auditing of your AWS account. Actions taken by a user, role, or an AWS service are recorded as events in CloudTrail. Events include actions taken in the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface, and AWS SDKs and APIs.

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Comparison Between Amazon CloudWatch And AWS CloudTrail

Conclusion

Amazon CloudWatch & AWS CloudTrain are both nice services, and both are used for different use cases.

For the use case of application logging/resources performance monitoring, Amazon CloudWatch does the perfect job.

For the use case of AWS different Services APIs activity monitoring/auditing purposes, AWS CloudTrail works well.

Sources

  1. https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/
  2. https://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/
  3. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awscloudtrail/latest/userguide/cloudtrail-user-guide.html