AWS · Management

AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail logs every API call made across your account, capturing who did what, when, and from which IP address. It serves as the primary audit trail for security investigations and compliance checks, delivering immutable event history to S3 or CloudWatch Logs. This visibility is essential for detecting unauthorized access attempts or understanding configuration changes across your infrastructure.

Since it’s always free, you can enable it on every account without budget concerns. The trade-off is storage costs; while logging itself is free, you pay for the S3 bucket where events are stored and any CloudWatch Logs ingestion. Keep retention policies tight to avoid paying for long-term storage of low-value events.

• Free tier Yes
• Pricing Free tier
• Regions 15 · 6 continents
• SLA uptime 99.99%
• Compliance 13 certifications
• Provider health A