Server access logging for Amazon S3 buckets

[theodosiostziomakas]

A large electronics company is using Amazon Simple Storage Service to store important documents. For reporting purposes, they want to track and log every request access to their S3 buckets including the requester, bucket name, request time, request action, referrer, turnaround time, and error code information. The solution should also provide more visibility into the object-level operations of the bucket.

Which is the best solution among the following options that can satisfy the requirement?

A) Enable AWS CloudTrail to audit all Amazon S3 bucket access.

B) Enable server access logging for all required Amazon S3 buckets.

C) Enable the Requester Pays option to track access via AWS Billing.

D) Enable Amazon S3 Event Notifications for PUT and POST.

So in this one, I chose A. Even chatgpt agrees with this! It says that server access logging focuses on bucket-level access and does not log as much detail as CloudTrail, especially for object-level operations.

Kind regards,
Theodosios

[Neil-TutorialsDojo]

Hello Theodosios,

Good day!

Thanks for reaching out. Based on your shared requirements, the best solution for tracking and logging access to your S3 buckets would be to enable server access logging for all required buckets (Option B). This feature provides comprehensive logs of requests, including details like the requester, bucket name, request time, request action, and error codes. It also offers great visibility into object-level operations, which you mentioned is important. Plus, it’s cost-effective as you only pay for the storage used for the log files.

While AWS CloudTrail (Option A) is also a powerful logging solution and is often recommended for its comprehensive auditing capabilities, server access logging is more tailored to the specific requirements mentioned in this scenario, especially for object-level operations and detailed access information.

Regarding the answer provided by ChatGPT. While ChatGPT is a great tool for getting quick insights, it’s important to consider the specific context and official documentation for the best fit. In this case, server access logging aligns more with the detailed object-level logging requirements for S3 buckets.

For more details, you can refer to the official AWS documentation on logging with Amazon S3 |

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/logging-with-S3.html

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Neil @ tutorials dojo