S3 object-level logging integrates with AWS CloudTrail data events. AWS CloudTrail is a service that records and tracks all AWS API requests that are made. These can be programmatic requests made using an SDK or the AWS CLI, from within the AWS Management Console, or from other AWS services.
When S3 object-level logging is enabled, you must associate it with a CloudTrail trail. This trail will then record both write and read API activity (depending on its configuration) for objects within the configured bucket. Although we are discussing Amazon S3 here, S3 object-level logging relies heavily on CloudTrail, and so I shall discuss CloudTrail data events later in this chapter when I dive deeper into AWS CloudTrail and its logging capabilities.Â
Now that we have looked at an example of how logging can be achieved for S3, I now want to look at how logging can be used at the network level, using VPC Flow Logs.