Logging Amazon S3 API calls using Amazon CloudTrail
Amazon S3 is integrated with Amazon CloudTrail, a service that provides a record of actions taken by a user, role, or an Amazon Web Service. CloudTrail captures all API calls for Amazon S3 as events. The calls captured include calls from the Amazon S3 console and code calls to the Amazon S3 API operations. Using the information collected by CloudTrail, you can determine the request that was made to Amazon S3, the IP address from which the request was made, when it was made, and additional details.
Every event or log entry contains information about who generated the request. The identity information helps you determine the following:
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Whether the request was made with root user or user credentials.
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Whether the request was made on behalf of an IAM Identity Center user.
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Whether the request was made with temporary security credentials for a role or federated user.
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Whether the request was made by another Amazon Web Service.
CloudTrail is active in your Amazon Web Services account when you create the account and you automatically have access to the CloudTrail Event history. The CloudTrail Event history provides a viewable, searchable, downloadable, and immutable record of the past 90 days of recorded management events in an Amazon Web Services Region. For more information, see Working with CloudTrail Event history in the Amazon CloudTrail User Guide. There are no CloudTrail charges for viewing the Event history.
For an ongoing record of events in your Amazon Web Services account past 90 days, create a trail or a CloudTrail Lake event data store.
- CloudTrail trails
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A trail enables CloudTrail to deliver log files to an Amazon S3 bucket. All trails created using the Amazon Web Services Management Console are multi-Region. You can create a single-Region or a multi-Region trail by using the Amazon CLI. Creating a multi-Region trail is recommended because you capture activity in all Amazon Web Services Regions in your account. If you create a single-Region trail, you can view only the events logged in the trail's Amazon Web Services Region. For more information about trails, see Creating a trail for your Amazon Web Services account and Creating a trail for an organization in the Amazon CloudTrail User Guide.
You can deliver one copy of your ongoing management events to your Amazon S3 bucket at no charge from CloudTrail by creating a trail, however, there are Amazon S3 storage charges. For more information about CloudTrail pricing, see Amazon CloudTrail Pricing
. For information about Amazon S3 pricing, see Amazon S3 Pricing . - CloudTrail Lake event data stores
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CloudTrail Lake lets you run SQL-based queries on your events. CloudTrail Lake converts existing events in row-based JSON format to Apache ORC
format. ORC is a columnar storage format that is optimized for fast retrieval of data. Events are aggregated into event data stores, which are immutable collections of events based on criteria that you select by applying advanced event selectors. The selectors that you apply to an event data store control which events persist and are available for you to query. For more information about CloudTrail Lake, see Working with Amazon CloudTrail Lake in the Amazon CloudTrail User Guide. CloudTrail Lake event data stores and queries incur costs. When you create an event data store, you choose the pricing option you want to use for the event data store. The pricing option determines the cost for ingesting and storing events, and the default and maximum retention period for the event data store. For more information about CloudTrail pricing, see Amazon CloudTrail Pricing
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You can store your log files in your bucket for as long as you want, but you can also define Amazon S3 Lifecycle rules to archive or delete log files automatically. By default, your log files are encrypted by using Amazon S3 server-side encryption (SSE).
Using CloudTrail logs with Amazon S3 server access logs and CloudWatch Logs
Amazon CloudTrail logs provide a record of actions taken by a user, role, or an Amazon service in Amazon S3, while Amazon S3 server access logs provide detailed records for the requests that are made to an S3 bucket. For more information about how the different logs work, and their properties, performance, and costs, see Logging options for Amazon S3.
You can use Amazon CloudTrail logs together with server access logs for Amazon S3. CloudTrail logs provide you with detailed API tracking for Amazon S3 bucket-level and object-level operations. Server access logs for Amazon S3 provide you with visibility into object-level operations on your data in Amazon S3. For more information about server access logs, see Logging requests with server access logging.
You can also use CloudTrail logs together with Amazon CloudWatch for Amazon S3. CloudTrail integration with CloudWatch Logs delivers S3 bucket-level API activity captured by CloudTrail to a CloudWatch log stream in the CloudWatch log group that you specify. You can create CloudWatch alarms for monitoring specific API activity and receive email notifications when the specific API activity occurs. For more information about CloudWatch alarms for monitoring specific API activity, see the Amazon CloudTrail User Guide. For more information about using CloudWatch with Amazon S3, see Monitoring metrics with Amazon CloudWatch.
Note
S3 does not support delivery of CloudTrail logs to the requester or the bucket owner for VPC endpoint requests when the VPC endpoint policy denies them.
CloudTrail tracking with Amazon S3 SOAP API calls
CloudTrail tracks Amazon S3 SOAP API calls. Amazon S3 SOAP support over HTTP is deprecated, but it is still available over HTTPS. For more information about Amazon S3 SOAP support, see Appendix a: Using the SOAP API.
Important
Newer Amazon S3 features are not supported for SOAP. We recommend that you use either the REST API or the Amazon SDKs.
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ListBuckets |
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CreateBucket |
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DeleteBucket |
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GetBucketAcl |
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PutBucketAcl |
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GetBucketLogging |
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PutBucketLogging |
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For more information about CloudTrail and Amazon S3, see the following topics: