How does 30-day free trial work in Runtime Monitoring - Amazon GuardDuty
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).

How does 30-day free trial work in Runtime Monitoring

The 30-day free trial period works differently for the new GuardDuty accounts and the existing accounts that have already enabled EKS Runtime Monitoring prior to when Runtime Monitoring capability extended to Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon Fargate (Amazon ECS only).

I am using GuardDuty trial period or I have never enabled EKS Runtime Monitoring

The following list explains how the 30-day free trial period works if you're either using the GuardDuty 30-day trial period or have never enabled EKS Runtime Monitoring:

  • When you enable GuardDuty for the first time, Runtime Monitoring and EKS Runtime Monitoring will not be enabled by default.

    When you enable Runtime Monitoring for your account or organization, make sure to also configure the GuardDuty security agent for the resource that you want to monitor for threat detection. For example, if you want to use Runtime Monitoring for your Amazon EC2 instances, then after you enable Runtime Monitoring, you must also configure the security agent for Amazon EC2. You can choose to do this either manually or automatically through GuardDuty.

  • The Runtime Monitoring protection plan is enabled at the account level. The 30-day free trial period works at the resource level. After the GuardDuty security agent gets deployed to a specific resource type, the 30-day free trial starts when GuardDuty receives its first runtime event associated with this resource type. For example, you have deployed the GuardDuty agent at the resource level (for Amazon EC2 instance, Amazon ECS cluster, and Amazon EKS cluster). When GuardDuty receives the first runtime event for an Amazon EC2 instance, the 30-day free trial will start for Amazon EC2 only.

  • When you want to enable only EKS Runtime Monitoring – When you enable GuardDuty for the first time, EKS Runtime Monitoring is not enabled by default (after the release of Runtime Monitoring). You will need to enable EKS Runtime Monitoring. To use it optimally, make sure that you either manage the GuardDuty security agent manually or enable automated agent configuration so that GuardDuty manages the agent on your behalf. Your 30-day free trial period for EKS Runtime Monitoring starts when GuardDuty receives its first runtime event for the Amazon EKS resource.