Logging Amazon CloudWatch Events API Calls with Amazon CloudTrail

Amazon CloudWatch Events is integrated with Amazon CloudTrail, a service that provides a record of actions taken by a user, role, or an Amazon service in CloudWatch Events. CloudTrail captures API calls made by or on behalf of your Amazon account. The calls captured include calls from the CloudWatch console and code calls to the CloudWatch Events API operations. If you create a trail, you can enable continuous delivery of CloudTrail events to an Amazon S3 bucket, including events for CloudWatch Events. If you don't configure a trail, you can still view the most recent events in the CloudTrail console in Event history. Using the information collected by CloudTrail, you can determine the request that was made to CloudWatch Events, the IP address from which the request was made, who made the request, when it was made, and additional details.

To learn more about CloudTrail, including how to configure and enable it, see the Amazon CloudTrail User Guide.

CloudWatch Events Information in CloudTrail

CloudTrail is enabled on your Amazon account when you create the account. When supported event activity occurs in CloudWatch Events, that activity is recorded in a CloudTrail event along with other Amazon service events in Event history. You can view, search, and download recent events in your Amazon account. For more information, see Viewing Events with CloudTrail Event History.

For an ongoing record of events in your Amazon account, including events for CloudWatch Events, create a trail. A trail enables CloudTrail to deliver log files to an Amazon S3 bucket. By default, when you create a trail in the console, the trail applies to all Amazon Regions. The trail logs events from all Regions in the Amazon partition and delivers the log files to the Amazon S3 bucket that you specify. Additionally, you can configure other Amazon services to further analyze and act upon the event data collected in CloudTrail logs. For more information, see the following:

CloudWatch Events supports logging the following actions as events in CloudTrail log files:

Every event or log entry contains information about who generated the request. The identity information helps you determine the following:

For more information, see the CloudTrail userIdentity Element.

Example: CloudWatch Events Log File Entries

A trail is a configuration that enables delivery of events as log files to an Amazon S3 bucket that you specify. CloudTrail log files contain one or more log entries. An event represents a single request from any source and includes information about the requested action, the date and time of the action, request parameters, and so on. CloudTrail log files aren't an ordered stack trace of the public API calls, so they don't appear in any specific order.

The following CloudTrail log file entry shows that a user called the CloudWatch Events PutRule action.

{
         "eventVersion":"1.03",
         "userIdentity":{
            "type":"Root",
            "principalId":"123456789012",
            "arn":"arn:aws:iam::123456789012:root",
            "accountId":"123456789012",
            "accessKeyId":"AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE",
            "sessionContext":{
               "attributes":{
                  "mfaAuthenticated":"false",
                  "creationDate":"2015-11-17T23:56:15Z"
               }
            }
         },
         "eventTime":"2015-11-18T00:11:28Z",
         "eventSource":"events.amazonaws.com",
         "eventName":"PutRule",
         "awsRegion":"us-east-1",
         "sourceIPAddress":"AWS Internal",
         "userAgent":"AWS CloudWatch Console",
         "requestParameters":{
            "description":"",
            "name":"cttest2",
            "state":"ENABLED",
            "eventPattern":"{\"source\":[\"aws.ec2\"],\"detail-type\":[\"EC2 Instance State-change Notification\"]}",
            "scheduleExpression":""
         },
         "responseElements":{
            "ruleArn":"arn:aws:events:us-east-1:123456789012:rule/cttest2"
         },
         "requestID":"e9caf887-8d88-11e5-a331-3332aa445952",
         "eventID":"49d14f36-6450-44a5-a501-b0fdcdfaeb98",
         "eventType":"AwsApiCall",
         "apiVersion":"2015-10-07",
         "recipientAccountId":"123456789012"
}