5.1. Centralized Logging and Monitoring

Centralizing logs and monitoring data from all sources is a foundational practice for effective cloud security. It provides a holistic view of your security posture and simplifies analysis.

The First Principle is that centralized logging and monitoring provide a single source of truth for security-relevant events and resource configurations, enabling efficient security analysis, faster incident response, and comprehensive auditing.

This section explores core AWS services for centralized logging and monitoring.

Scenario: You need to collect security-relevant logs from API calls, network traffic, and resource configuration changes across multiple AWS accounts, and store them securely for auditing and real-time analysis.

Reflection Question: How does centralized logging and monitoring (e.g., collecting logs from CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and AWS Config into S3) fundamentally provide a single source of truth for security-relevant events and resource configurations, enabling efficient security analysis and faster incident response?