Introduction

Monitoring and auditing within the context of AWS are essential practices for managing cloud resources effectively. They provide critical insights into the operation and security of applications and services running in the AWS environment. AWS provides several services to achieve real-time monitoring, receive alerts on specific events, audit historical changes, and maintain a robust security posture. This comprehensive approach to monitoring and auditing enhances the operational efficiency of our AWS environment and reinforces its compliance with internal policies and external regulations.

• Monitoring in AWS primarily focuses on the performance and health of our AWS resources. This involves tracking metrics and logs to ensure our applications and services operate as expected. The AWS CloudWatch service is one such service for monitoring resources.

• Auditing in AWS is about keeping track of actions and changes within our AWS environment. It ensures compliance with security and governance standards by recording and storing logs of user activities and API usage. The AWS CloudTrail service is one such service for logging all account activity and AWS Config for compliance management.

In this section, we’ll explore the most important AWS services we can use for monitoring and auditing: