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 Amazon EMR API calls in Amazon CloudTrail

Amazon EMR is integrated with Amazon CloudTrail, a service that provides a record of actions taken by a user, role, or an Amazon service in Amazon EMR. CloudTrail captures all API calls for Amazon EMR as events. The calls captured include calls from the Amazon EMR console and code calls to the Amazon EMR API operations. If you create a trail, you can enable continuous delivery of CloudTrail events to an Amazon S3 bucket, including events for Amazon EMR. 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 Amazon EMR, 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, see the Amazon CloudTrail User Guide.

Amazon EMR information in CloudTrail

CloudTrail is enabled on your Amazon account when you create the account. When activity occurs in Amazon EMR, 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 Amazon EMR, 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:

All Amazon EMR actions are logged by CloudTrail and are documented in the Amazon EMR API Reference. For example, calls to the RunJobFlow, ListCluster and DescribeCluster actions 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:

In the case where a process, rather than a user, creates a cluster, you can use the principalId identifier to determine the user associated with the cluster's creation. For more information, see the CloudTrail userIdentity element.

Example: Amazon EMR 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 RunJobFlow action.

{
	"Records": [
	{
         "eventVersion":"1.01",
         "userIdentity":{
            "type":"IAMUser",
            "principalId":"EX_PRINCIPAL_ID",
            "arn":"arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/temporary-user-xx-7M",
            "accountId":"123456789012",
            "userName":"temporary-user-xx-7M"
         },
         "eventTime":"2018-03-31T17:59:21Z",
         "eventSource":"elasticmapreduce.amazonaws.com",
         "eventName":"RunJobFlow",
         "awsRegion":"us-west-2",
         "sourceIPAddress":"192.0.2.1",
         "userAgent":"aws-sdk-java/unknown-version Linux/xx Java_HotSpot(TM)_64-Bit_Server_VM/xx",
         "requestParameters":{
            "tags":[
               {
                  "value":"prod",
                  "key":"domain"
               },
               {
                  "value":"us-west-2",
                  "key":"realm"
               },
               {
                  "value":"VERIFICATION",
                  "key":"executionType"
               }
            ],
            "instances":{
               "slaveInstanceType":"m5.xlarge",
               "ec2KeyName":"emr-integtest",
               "instanceCount":1,
               "masterInstanceType":"m5.xlarge",
               "keepJobFlowAliveWhenNoSteps":true,
               "terminationProtected":false
            },
            "visibleToAllUsers":false,
            "name":"MyCluster",
            "ReleaseLabel":"emr-5.16.0"
         },
         "responseElements":{
            "jobFlowId":"j-2WDJCGEG4E6AJ"
         },
         "requestID":"2f482daf-b8fe-11e3-89e7-75a3d0e071c5",
         "eventID":"b348a38d-f744-4097-8b2a-e68c9b424698"
      },
	...additional entries
  ]
}