Summary and Quiz

Get a refresher of what you’ve learned in the Monitoring and Auditing services provided by AWS and take a short quiz to validate your knowledge.

We'll cover the following

In this lesson, we’ll summarize what we’ve learned in this chapter and test our knowledge of the AWS services we learned about with a short quiz.

Summary

Here’s a summary of the most important key takeaways from this chapter:

  • CloudWatch: CloudWatch provides observability by tracking metrics and insights from AWS resources. Here are the most important features of CloudWatch:

    • Metrics: Quantifiable measures for tracking resource or service status.

    • CloudWatch Logs: Real-time log data for performance and operational issue analysis.

    • Alarms: Monitor various metrics and respond to changes.

    • Events: Trigger actions in response to operational changes.

  • AWS CloudTrail: AWS CloudTrail is essential for tracking user and service activities within AWS, helping in auditing, validating compliance, identifying security breaches, and troubleshooting operational issues. It offers the following important features:

    • CloudTrail event: A CloudTrail event is any action taken within our account. CloudTrail records these actions as events within the logs.

    • CloudTrail services: CloudTrail is an expansive service that we can break into the following sub-services:

    • Event History: CloudTrail Event History is for viewing recent activity history in our AWS account.

  • AWS Config: AWS Config is instrumental in auditing and ensuring compliance with AWS resources, monitoring configuration changes, and facilitating remediation actions. Here are the most important features of Config:

    • Configuration recorder: Continuously records AWS resource configurations.

    • Configuration items: Records of an AWS resource’s configuration at a specific moment, including metadata.

    • Configuration history: A chronological record of a resource’s configuration items.

    • Config rules: Defines compliance conditions for resources.

    • Remediation actions: Automated or manual actions triggered by configuration changes violating Config rules. Remediation can use AWS Systems Manager or invoke AWS Lambda functions.

Comparing CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and Config

The following diagram illustrates a comparison chart for the CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and Config services:

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