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).

CloudTrail concepts

This section summarizes basic concepts related to CloudTrail.

CloudTrail events

An event in CloudTrail is the record of an activity in an Amazon account. This activity can be an action taken by an IAM identity, or service that is monitorable by CloudTrail. CloudTrail events provide a history of both API and non-API account activity made through the Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon SDKs, command line tools, and other Amazon services.

CloudTrail logs three types of events:

All event types use a CloudTrail JSON log format.

By default, trails and event data stores log management events, but not data or Insights events.

For information about how Amazon Web Services integrate with CloudTrail, see Amazon service topics for CloudTrail.

Management events

Management events provide information about management operations that are performed on resources in your Amazon account. These are also known as control plane operations.

Example management events include:

Management events can also include non-API events that occur in your account. For example, when a user signs in to your account, CloudTrail logs the ConsoleLogin event. For more information, see Non-API events captured by CloudTrail.

By default, CloudTrail trails and CloudTrail Lake event data stores log management events. For more information about logging management events, see Logging management events.

Data events

Data events provide information about the resource operations performed on or in a resource. These are also known as data plane operations. Data events are often high-volume activities.

Example data events include:

The following table shows the data event types available for trails. The Data event type (console) column shows the appropriate selection in the console. The resources.type value column shows the resources.type value that you would specify to include data events of that type in your trail using the Amazon CLI or CloudTrail APIs.

For trails, you can use basic or advanced event selectors to log data events for Amazon S3 buckets and bucket objects, Lambda functions, and DynamoDB tables (shown in the first three rows of the table). You can use only advanced event selectors to log the data event types shown in the remaining rows.

Data events are not logged by default when you create a trail or event data store. To record CloudTrail data events, you must explicitly add the supported resources or resource types for which you want to collect activity. For more information about logging data events, see Logging data events.

Additional charges apply for logging data events. For CloudTrail pricing, see Amazon CloudTrail Pricing.

Insights events

CloudTrail Insights events capture unusual API call rate or error rate activity in your Amazon account by analyzing CloudTrail management activity. Insights events provide relevant information, such as the associated API, error code, incident time, and statistics, that help you understand and act on unusual activity. Unlike other types of events captured in a CloudTrail trail or event data store, Insights events are logged only when CloudTrail detects changes in your account's API usage or error rate logging that differ significantly from the account's typical usage patterns.

Examples of activity that might generate Insights events include:

These examples are provided for illustration purposes only. Your results may vary depending on your use case.

To log CloudTrail Insights events, you must explicitly enable Insights events on a new or existing trail or event data store. For more information about logging Insights events, see Logging Insights events.

Additional charges apply for Insights events. You will be charged separately if you enable Insights for both trails and event data stores. For more information, see Amazon CloudTrail Pricing.

Viewing Insights events for trails and event data stores

CloudTrail supports Insights events for both trails and event data stores, however, there are some differences in how you view and access Insights events.

Viewing Insights events for trails

If you have Insights events enabled on a trail, and CloudTrail detects unusual activity, Insights events are logged to a different folder or prefix in the destination S3 bucket for your trail. You can also see the type of insight and the incident time period when you view Insights events on the CloudTrail console. For more information, see Viewing CloudTrail Insights events for trails in the CloudTrail console.

Viewing Insights events for event data stores

To log Insights events in CloudTrail Lake, you need a destination event data store that logs Insights events and a source event data store that enables Insights and logs management events. For more information, see Create an event data store for CloudTrail Insights events with the console.

If you have CloudTrail Insights enabled on a source event data store and CloudTrail detects unusual activity, CloudTrail delivers Insights events to your destination event data store. You can then query your destination event data store to get information about your Insights events and can optionally save the query results to an S3 bucket. For more information, see Create or edit a query and View sample queries in the CloudTrail console.

You can view the Insights Events dashboard to visualize the Insights events in your destination event data store. For more information, see View CloudTrail Lake dashboards.

Event history

CloudTrail event history provides a viewable, searchable, downloadable, and immutable record of the past 90 days of CloudTrail management events in an Amazon Web Services Region. You can use this history to gain visibility into actions taken in your Amazon account in the Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon SDKs, command line tools, and other Amazon services. You can customize your view of event history in the CloudTrail console by selecting which columns are displayed. For more information, see Working with CloudTrail Event history.

Trails

A trail is a configuration that enables delivery of CloudTrail events to an S3 bucket, with optional delivery to CloudWatch Logs and Amazon EventBridge. You can use a trail to choose the CloudTrail events you want delivered, encrypt your CloudTrail event log files with an Amazon KMS key, and set up Amazon SNS notifications for log file delivery. For more information about how to create and manage a trail, see Creating a trail for your Amazon Web Services account.

Multi-Region and single-Region trails

You can create two types of trails for an Amazon Web Services account: multi-Region trails and single-Region trails.

A multi-Region trail has the following advantages:

When you apply a trail to all Amazon Regions, CloudTrail uses the trail that you create in a particular Region to create trails with identical configurations in all other Regions in the Amazon partition in which you are working.

This has the following effects:

Regardless of whether a trail is multi-Region or single-Region, events sent to Amazon EventBridge are received in each Region's event bus, rather than in one single event bus.

Multiple trails per Region

If you have different but related user groups, such as developers, security personnel, and IT auditors, you can create multiple trails per Region. This allows each group to receive its own copy of the log files.

CloudTrail supports five trails per Region. A multi-Region trail counts as one trail per Region.

The following is an example of a Region with five trails:

You can view a list of trails in an Amazon Web Services Region in the Trails page of the CloudTrail console. For more information, see Updating a trail. For CloudTrail pricing, see Amazon CloudTrail Pricing.

Organization trails

An organization trail is a configuration that enables delivery of CloudTrail events in the management account and all member accounts in an Amazon Organizations organization to the same Amazon S3 bucket, CloudWatch Logs, and Amazon EventBridge. Creating an organization trail helps you define a uniform event logging strategy for your organization.

All organization trails created using the console are multi-Region organization trails that log events from the enabled Amazon Web Services Regions in each member account in the organization. To log events in all Amazon partitions in your organization, create a multi-Region organization trail in each partition. You can create either a single-Region or multi-Region organization trail by using the Amazon CLI. If you create a single-Region trail, you log activity only in the trail's Amazon Web Services Region (also referred to as the Home Region).

Although most Amazon Web Services Regions are enabled by default for your Amazon Web Services account, you must manually enable certain Regions (also referred to as opt-in Regions). For information about which Regions are enabled by default, see Considerations before enabling and disabling Regions in the Amazon Account Management Reference Guide. For the list of Regions CloudTrail supports, see CloudTrail supported Regions.

When you create an organization trail, a copy of the trail with the name that you give it is created in the member accounts that belongs to your organization.

Users with CloudTrail permissions in member accounts will be able to see organization trails (including the trail ARN) when they log into the Amazon CloudTrail console from their Amazon accounts, or when they run Amazon CLI commands such as describe-trails (although member accounts must use the ARN for the organization trail, and not the name, when using the Amazon CLI). However, users in member accounts will not have sufficient permissions to delete organization trails, turn logging on or off, change what types of events are logged, or otherwise alter organization trails in any way. For more information about Amazon Organizations, see Organizations Terminology and Concepts. For more information about creating and working with organization trails, see Creating a trail for an organization.

CloudTrail Insights

CloudTrail Insights help Amazon users identify and respond to unusual volumes of API calls or errors logged on API calls by continuously analyzing CloudTrail management events. An Insights event is a record of unusual levels of write management API activity, or unusual levels of errors returned on management API activity. By default, trails and event data stores don't log CloudTrail Insights events. In the console, you can choose to log Insights events when you create or update a trail or event data store. When you use the CloudTrail API, you can log Insights events by editing the settings of an existing trail or event data store with the PutInsightSelectors API. Additional charges apply for logging CloudTrail Insights events. You will be charged separately if you enable Insights for both trails and event data stores. For more information, see Logging Insights events and Amazon CloudTrail Pricing.

Tags

A tag is a customer-defined key and optional value that can be assigned to Amazon resources, such as CloudTrail trails, event data stores, and channels, S3 buckets used to store CloudTrail log files, Amazon Organizations organizations and organizational units, and many more. By adding the same tags to trails and to the S3 buckets you use to store log files for trails, you can make it easier to manage, search for, and filter these resources with Amazon Resource Groups. You can implement tagging strategies to help you consistently, effectively, and easily find and manage your resources. For more information, see Amazon Tagging Strategies.

Amazon Security Token Service and CloudTrail

Amazon Security Token Service (Amazon STS) is a service that has a global endpoint and also supports Region-specific endpoints. An endpoint is a URL that is the entry point for web service requests. For example, https://cloudtrail.us-west-2.amazonaws.com is the US West (Oregon) regional entry point for the Amazon CloudTrail service. Regional endpoints help reduce latency in your applications.

When you use an Amazon STS Region-specific endpoint, the trail in that Region delivers only the Amazon STS events that occur in that Region. For example, if you are using the endpoint sts.us-west-2.amazonaws.com, the trail in us-west-2 delivers only the Amazon STS events that originate from us-west-2. For more information about Amazon STS regional endpoints, see Activating and Deactivating Amazon STS in an Amazon Region in the IAM User Guide.

For a complete list of Amazon regional endpoints, see Amazon Regions and Endpoints in the Amazon Web Services General Reference. For details about events from the global Amazon STS endpoint, see Global service events.

Global service events

For most services, events are recorded in the Region where the action occurred. For global services such as Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon STS, and Amazon CloudFront, events are delivered to any trail that includes global services.

For most global services, events are logged as occurring in the China (Beijing) Region, but some global service events are logged as occurring in the China (Ningxia) Region.

To avoid receiving duplicate global service events, remember the following:

Example: