Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Logging Data API calls with Amazon CloudTrail

Data API is integrated with Amazon CloudTrail, a service that provides a record of actions taken by a user, role, or an Amazon service in Data API. CloudTrail captures all API calls for Data API as events, including calls from the Amazon RDS console and from code calls to the Data API operations. If you create a trail, you can enable continuous delivery of CloudTrail events to an Amazon S3 bucket, including events for Data API. If you don't configure a trail, you can still view the most recent events in the CloudTrail console in Event history. Using the data collected by CloudTrail, you can determine a lot of information. This information includes the request that was made to Data API, the IP address the request was made from, who made the request, when it was made, and additional details.

To learn more about CloudTrail, see the Amazon CloudTrail User Guide.

Working with Data API information in CloudTrail

CloudTrail is enabled on your Amazon account when you create the account. When activity occurs in Data API, 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 in the Amazon CloudTrail User Guide.

For an ongoing record of events in your Amazon account, including events for Data API, 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 Amazon 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 topics in the Amazon CloudTrail User Guide:

All Data API operations are logged by CloudTrail and documented in the Amazon RDS data service API reference. For example, calls to the BatchExecuteStatement, BeginTransaction, CommitTransaction, and ExecuteStatement operations generate entries in the 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.

Understanding Data API 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 example shows a CloudTrail log entry that demonstrates the ExecuteStatement operation.

{
    "eventVersion": "1.05",
    "userIdentity": {
        "type": "IAMUser",
        "principalId": "AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE",
        "arn": "arn:aws-cn:iam::123456789012:user/johndoe",
        "accountId": "123456789012",
        "accessKeyId": "AKIAI44QH8DHBEXAMPLE",
        "userName": "johndoe"
    },
    "eventTime": "2019-12-18T00:49:34Z",
    "eventSource": "rdsdata.amazonaws.com",
    "eventName": "ExecuteStatement",
    "awsRegion": "us-east-1",
    "sourceIPAddress": "192.0.2.0",
    "userAgent": "aws-cli/1.16.102 Python/3.7.2 Windows/10 botocore/1.12.92",
    "requestParameters": {
        "continueAfterTimeout": false,
        "database": "**********",
        "includeResultMetadata": false,
        "parameters": [],
        "resourceArn": "arn:aws-cn:rds:us-east-1:123456789012:cluster:my-database-1",
        "schema": "**********",
        "secretArn": "arn:aws-cn:secretsmanager:us-east-1:123456789012:secret:dataapisecret-ABC123",
        "sql": "**********"
    },
    "responseElements": null,
    "requestID": "6ba9a36e-b3aa-4ca8-9a2e-15a9eada988e",
    "eventID": "a2c7a357-ee8e-4755-a0d0-aed11ed4253a",
    "eventType": "AwsApiCall",
    "recipientAccountId": "123456789012"
}

Excluding Data API events from an Amazon CloudTrail trail

Most Data API users rely on the events in an Amazon CloudTrail trail to provide a record of Data API operations. The trail can be a valuable source of data for auditing critical events, such as a SQL statement that deleted rows in a table. In some cases, the metadata in a CloudTrail log entry can help you to avoid or resolve errors.

However, because the Data API can generate a large number of events, you can exclude Data API events from a CloudTrail trail. This per-trail setting excludes all Data API events. You can't exclude particular Data API events.

To exclude Data API events from a trail, do the following:

You can turn off this exclusion at any time by changing the console setting or the event selectors for a trail. The trail will then start recording Data API events. However, it can't recover Data API events that occurred while the exclusion was effective.

When you exclude Data API events by using the console or API, the resulting CloudTrail PutEventSelectors API operation is also logged in your CloudTrail logs. If Data API events don't appear in your CloudTrail logs, look for a PutEventSelectors event with the ExcludeManagementEventSources attribute set to rdsdata.amazonaws.com.

For more information, see Logging management events for trails in the Amazon CloudTrail User Guide.