Introduction
When you are on the AWS platform, there are many services out there that you can use to monitor your workloads. Today, we are going to discuss two such services – CloudTrail and CloudWatch.
Both of these services are critical to have in your environment to maintain its health, but they serve different purposes. Let's take a look at what they are and see how they stack up against each other.
What is CloudTrail?
CloudTrail is a service that allows you to get AWS API call history to manage changes and trends in your infrastructure. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity. You can also use it for compliance support.
What is CloudWatch?
On the other hand, CloudWatch provides you with an overview of your AWS resource usage, as well as monitoring and operational insight into your applications, services, and resources that are running. You can also use it to set alerts.
CloudTrail vs. CloudWatch
In the table below, we'll highlight the differences between CloudTrail and CloudWatch:
| Features | CloudTrail | CloudWatch |
|---|---|---|
| Use | Log Management | Monitoring |
| Pricing | Free for the first 7 days, then $2.00 per 100,000 events | $0.50 per metric/mo |
| Metrics | API trails, events & error | Resource Metrics |
| Data | API Calls | Custom |
| Log Retention | Indefinitely | Cluster Metrics |
| Alert | No | Yes |
You can see that CloudTrail is more of a compliance tool, it is built to record your API calls, audit and review the history of your AWS accounts, and also track and control changes being made to your environment.
In contrast, CloudWatch is the tool that continuously monitors your AWS environment and its applications. It analyses log data in real-time and presents easy-to-understand metrics, which can be used to set alerts on specific events.
Conclusion
Now you know the difference between CloudTrail and CloudWatch, it will be easier for you to decide which one to use as they are both useful depending on your use cases. If you're looking for more operational insights/tools or alerting, then go for CloudWatch. But if you're looking for easier-to-audit and compliance-focused insights, go for CloudTrail.
We hope that this comparison has helped you understand how these two tools differ from one another. But, if you have any questions or find this blog incomplete, feel free to reach out to us, and we'll add anything that we missed.
References
- AWS. (n.d.). AWS CloudTrail. Retrieved from https://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/
- AWS. (n.d.). Amazon CloudWatch. Retrieved from https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/