AWS CloudWatch vs AWS CloudTrail | Detailed Comparison

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2 min read

What is CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch is basically a monitoring service for your AWS cloud resources and for the applications you run on AWS. It enables monitoring for EC2 and other cloud services so that you get an alert when there anything goes wrong. It provides insights about your applications and your AWS cloud resources from which we can run our application smoothly and efficiently. You can use CloudWatch to detect anomalous behavior, set alarms, visualize logs, take automated actions, to get a unified view of operational health.

cloudtrail vs cloudwatch

How does CloudWatch work?

CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, and visualizes automatically using dashboards so we can get a unified view of our AWS resources, your applications, and services that run in AWS. You also can set alarms based on the metric value you specify. We can also set up automated actions that will notify us when the alarm is triggered and it will start taking actions against it automatically which helps us to reduce resolution time.

cloudtrail vs cloudwatch

What is CloudTrail?

AWS CloudTrail is a tool from AWS which provides governance, auditing, compliance monitoring, risk monitoring of your AWS account. It is called a Management and Governance tool in the AWS console. With the help of CloudTrail, we can watch the event history of our AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command-line tools, and other AWS services. We can also use CloudTrail to detect unusual activity in our AWS Account.

cloudtrail vs cloudwatch

How does CloudTrail work?

AWS CloudTrail tracks the user activity and detects unusual API usage It captures and records the activity as a CloudTrail event. Now it delivers the events to the AWS CloudTrail console, S3 bucket, and optionally CloudWatch Logs. With the use of CloudWatch Alarms and Events, it takes action when important events are detected. Users can review recent events in the AWS CloudTrail console and can download the activity of Cloudtrail with the help of CloudTrail history.

Difference Between Amazon CloudWatch and CloudTrail ##

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