List of factors that affect application layer event detection and mititgation with Shield Advanced - Amazon WAF, Amazon Firewall Manager, and Amazon Shield Advanced
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List of factors that affect application layer event detection and mititgation with Shield Advanced

This section describes the factors that affect the detection and mitigation of application layer events by Shield Advanced.

Health checks

Health checks that accurately report the overall health of your application provide Shield Advanced with information about the traffic conditions that your application is experiencing. Shield Advanced requires less information pointing to a potential attack when your application is reporting unhealthy and it requires more evidence of an attack if your application is reporting healthy.

It's important to configure your health checks so that they accurately report application health. For more information and guidance, see Health-based detection using health checks with Shield Advanced and Route 53.

Traffic baselines

Traffic baselines give Shield Advanced information about the characteristics of normal traffic for your application. Shield Advanced uses these baselines to recognize when your application isn't receiving normal traffic, so it can notify you and, as configured, start devising and testing mitigation options to counter a potential attack. For additional information about how Shield Advanced uses traffic baselines to detect potential events, see the overview section Shield Advanced detection logic for application layer threats (layer 7).

Shield Advanced creates its baselines from information provided by the web ACL that's associated with the protected resource. The web ACL must be associated with the resource for at least 24 hours and up to 30 days before Shield Advanced can reliably determine the application's baselines. The time required begins when you associate the web ACL, either through Shield Advanced or through Amazon WAF.

For more information about using a web ACL with your Shield Advanced application layer protections, see Protecting the application layer with Amazon WAF web ACLs and Shield Advanced.

Rate-based rules

Rate-based rules can help mitigate attacks. They can also obscure attacks, by mitigating them before they become a large enough problem to show up against normal traffic baselines or in health check status reporting.

We recommend using rate-based rules in your web ACL when you protect an application resource with Shield Advanced. Even though their mitigations can obscure a potential attack, they are a valuable first line of defense, helping ensure that your application stays available to your legitimate customers. The traffic that your rate-based rules detect and rate limit is visible in your Amazon WAF metrics.

In addition to your own rate-based rules, if you enable automatic application layer DDoS mitigation, Shield Advanced adds a rule group to your web ACL that it uses to mitigate attacks. In this rule group, Shield Advanced always has a rate-based rule in place that limits the volume of requests from IP addresses that are known to be sources of DDoS attacks. Metrics for the traffic that the Shield Advanced rules mitigate aren't available for you to view.

For more information about rate-based rules, see Using rate-based rule statements in Amazon WAF. For information about the rate-based rule that Shield Advanced uses for automatic application layer DDoS mitigation, see Protecting the application layer with the Shield Advanced rule group.

For more information about Shield Advanced and Amazon WAF metrics, see Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch.