Network monitoring and logging services that are available in AWS (for example, CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, VPC Traffic Mirroring, VPC Flow Logs, Transit Gateway Network Manager)

What is Amazon CloudWatch and how does it help in network monitoring?

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that provides data and actionable insights to monitor applications, understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. It collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, and provides a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers.

How does AWS CloudTrail complement network monitoring?

AWS CloudTrail is an auditing, compliance monitoring, and governance service that records and retains account activity related to actions made on your AWS infrastructure. For network monitoring, CloudTrail helps by logging all events that could affect network configurations or security, such as changes to security groups, network ACLs, or route tables, providing a history of the AWS API calls for an account.

Can you describe VPC Flow Logs and its utility in traffic monitoring?

VPC Flow Logs is a feature that enables you to capture information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in your VPC. Flow logs can be used for network monitoring, to troubleshoot why specific traffic is not reaching an instance, and to help in auditing the traffic that is reaching and leaving your instances. It can be sent to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or Amazon S3 for analysis and storage.

How does VPC Traffic Mirroring differ from VPC Flow Logs in terms of network traffic monitoring?

VPC Traffic Mirroring duplicates the network traffic from an elastic network interface of EC2 instances and then forwards the traffic to a specified destination for deep packet inspection or analysis. Unlike VPC Flow Logs, which provide metadata about the traffic (source, destination, protocol, bytes transferred, etc.), traffic mirroring allows for the capture of the actual content of the packets, therefore offering more detailed analysis of the mirrored network traffic.

What features does the Transit Gateway Network Manager provide and how is it beneficial for network monitoring?

The AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager allows you to centrally manage and monitor your global network across AWS and on-premises environments. It provides a visual dashboard to view your network topology and offers network health metrics such as packet loss and latency. This helps in quickly identifying issues and performing remediation, thus enhancing network monitoring and management.

Explain how Amazon CloudWatch can be used to monitor the health of your network infrastructure.

Amazon CloudWatch can monitor network health by collecting network-related metrics, such as bytes in/out, packets in/out, and packet drop counts from various AWS services like EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), and Amazon RDS instances. These metrics can be aggregated and visualized in CloudWatch Dashboards to give insights into the health and performance of the network infrastructure.

Describe how AWS CloudTrail can help track changes to VPCs and related networking resources.

AWS CloudTrail records all API calls for your AWS account, including those that make changes to Amazon VPC resources. This includes the creation, modification, or deletion of VPCs, subnets, network ACLs, route tables, internet gateways, and more. Tracking these changes helps in auditing, security analysis, and ensuring that the network configuration adheres to the compliance standards of an organization.

In what scenarios would you use VPC Traffic Mirroring instead of VPC Flow Logs?

You would use VPC Traffic Mirroring instead of VPC Flow Logs when you need a detailed examination of actual packet content, headers, and payloads for troubleshooting, deep packet inspection, or stringent network security requirements. It serves well in scenarios such as intrusion detection and prevention, performing network and performance analysis, and replicating production traffic to test environments.

How do you set up and access VPC Flow Logs?

To set up VPC Flow Logs, you can create a flow log for a VPC, subnet, or network interface through the VPC console, the EC2 console, or by using the AWS CLI or AWS API. You must specify the destination for the flow log records, which can be either Amazon CloudWatch Logs or Amazon S Once configured, the flow log data can be accessed from the specified destination service.

What kind of data does CloudWatch Logs Insights query and how is it useful in network operations?

CloudWatch Logs Insights enables you to explore, analyze, and visualize your log data in CloudWatch Logs. It can query logs such as VPC Flow Logs, Lambda Logs, and many other log types, enabling you to perform complex queries to swiftly troubleshoot operational problems, understand system-wide performance, and get insights into your network operations.

How can one secure the access to VPC Flow Logs and VPC Traffic Mirroring Sessions?

Access to VPC Flow Logs and VPC Traffic Mirroring Sessions can be secured using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. One can create IAM roles with specific permissions to control who has the authorization to create, modify, delete, and access the flow logs and traffic mirroring sessions. Additionally, the data can be encrypted using AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for secure storage and transmission.

Is it possible to enable AWS CloudTrail for specific resources only, such as VPCs, and what are the implications of granular logging?

As of the last knowledge update, AWS CloudTrail records account-wide events by default. However, you can create CloudTrail event selectors to specify that read and write API activity on certain resources be logged, providing a more granular approach to logging. This helps in reducing the amount of logged events, saving costs and focusing on specific resources of interest, such as VPCs. It is important though, as this might limit the visibility of changes across other AWS services and resources.