AWS Config vs CloudTrail: Comparison Based on Reporting, Configuration, Compliance, Pricing and Use Cases

If you want to understand AWS Config vs CloudTrail better, this guide will break it all down. AWS Config is a configuration monitoring and assessment tool; it keeps a record of changes that impact how resources are set up. On the other hand, AWS CloudTrail is a logging tool; it tracks AWS API calls, as well as user and role activities in an AWS environment.

The primary difference between CloudTrail vs AWS Config is the type of data that they track; Config tracks configuration data, while CloudTrail records API and user activity data. Apart from that, data captured by CloudTrail is typically more detailed compared to AWS Config records.

The following table highlights the differences between AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail:

Factors:	AWS Config	AWS CloudTrail
Reported Events	Configuration changes, including creation, updates and deletion events	Management, insight & data events
Configuration Changes	Reports & monitors configuration changes	Reports, monitors & logs activities (mainly API events) May indirectly provide insight into configuration changes
Compliance & Security	Primarily aids compliance, but is also useful for security	Primarily aids security but also works toward compliance
Supported AWS Services	Supports various AWS services, including Amazon EC2, ECR, ECS, Cognito, CloudWatch and CodeGuru Doesn’t support features like the ECS service, ECS clusters, CodeCommit repository or CodDeploy app	Supports various services, including EC2, CloudWatch, Connect, ECS, EKS & S3 Doesn’t support features like Amazon VPC endpoint policy-specific events or AWS Import/Export
Use Cases	Resource configuration inventory, configuration compliance evaluation & simple troubleshooting	Security analysis, events auditing & troubleshooting
Pricing	Based on the number of configuration items recorded, conformance pack evaluations & active config rule assessments	CloudTrail Lake pricing is based on the volume of data retained Trails & Insights pricing is based on the number of events

Using AWS Config and CloudTrail offers comprehensive visibility, enhanced security and better compliance. Troubleshooting is also easier when you combine AWS Config and CloudTrail — you’ll know not only the configuration changes, but also the invoking AWS users or APIs.

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Adeyomola Kazeem (Writer)

Adeyomola Kazeem is an expert in cloud computing and cloud services, with over five years of experience in writing and technical expertise in Linux and DevOps. Holding a diploma in cloud computing from Altschool Africa and a bachelor of pharmacy from the University of Ibadan, Adeyomola is also an AWS Solutions Architect Associate and AWS Cloud Practitioner, contributing to his proficiency in cloud infrastructure and cloud storage. His expertise encompasses cloud deployment models, virtualization, containerization and serverless computing, making him a valuable asset to Cloudwards in simplifying complex cloud concepts for a wide audience.

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Brett Day (Writer, Editor)

Brett Day is an experienced writer and editor at Cloudwards, specializing in project management. With over 14 years in retail management for top-tier companies like CVS, Old Navy, and Kohl’s, he brings a diverse and enriched background to his writing. Brett has also owned a photography business for six years, and his written work has been featured on renowned platforms such as Yahoo, GotGame, and The Phoblographer. Brett also holds a Six Sigma White Belt certification. Outside of his professional pursuits, he’s an avid gamer, passionate hiker and enthusiastic photographer.

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What Is AWS Config?

AWS Config is a configuration assessment and tracking tool. It monitors the configurations of your resources in AWS, on-premises servers or other third-party clouds, tracking changes and auditing them for compliance. It’s a way to keep tabs on the setup of your resources and ensure they remain compliant.

Besides helping ensure compliance, data from AWS Config can aid in troubleshooting — knowing what the configuration was before an issue started gives some insight into the problem.

How Does AWS Config Work?

AWS Config works by discovering resources in your cloud environment and then tracking configuration changes that are made to those resources. For instance, AWS Config will discover resources like VPC. When it notices configurational changes, like adding a route to a route table, it invokes a descriptive API call.

The API call will provide the updated configuration, which Config will add to the historical configuration data. Config can also deliver updated configuration data to services like Amazon S3 and Amazon SNS.

AWS Config constantly monitors resources, tracking events like configuration creations, updates and deletions. It also takes note of changes in the association between resources in your Amazon Web Services environment.

Generally, when AWS Config detects API calls that make changes to a resource’s configuration, it gets triggered. However, AWS Config also gets triggered with scheduled runs.

What Is AWS CloudTrail?

AWS CloudTrail is a logging service that records the events that happen in AWS, hybrid or multicloud environments. It tracks user activity, role activity and API calls, ensuring that every event is recorded. You could say it notes the “who,” “why” and “when” of activities in AWS cloud, including AWS SDKs, AWS Command Line Tools (CLIs) and AWS Management Consoles.

CloudTrail comes in handy during auditing and compliance assessments. It also contributes data that helps improve security posture and sheds light on operational needs.

How Does AWS CloudTrail Work?

AWS CloudTrail works by being constantly on the prowl, listening and capturing events made in your AWS environment. It records management, data and insight events from the management console, SDK, CLI and pretty much any resource.

CloudTrail is primarily triggered by API calls, but it’s constantly looking for any activity in the environment. However, it doesn’t log services without public APIs or public access. CloudTrail wouldn’t work for AWS Import/Export and Amazon VPC endpoint policy-specific events.

CloudTrail events include historical data, and you can also integrate with services like Amazon EventBridge and AWS Organizations.

What Are the Differences Between AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail?

The main differences between AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail are their triggers, reported data, supported services and so on. Here are some details of these differences:

Reporting Differences Between AWS Config and CloudTrail

Reporting for AWS Config and CloudTrail involves collecting, organizing and presenting data about events in your AWS environment. However, while AWS Config focuses on and collects configuration state data, AWS CloudTrail collects data about pretty much any activity in your AWS environment.

Trigger Differences Between AWS Config and CloudTrail

Scheduled scans and API calls for configuration changes trigger AWS Config. On the other hand, virtually all API and non-API calls trigger AWS CloudTrail.

Configuration Differences Between AWS Config and CloudTrail

In this case, configuration describes the settings of resources in an AWS environment. Even though AWS CloudTrail doesn’t focus on tracking configuration changes like AWS Config does, you can still infer configuration changes from its logs.

Compliance and Security Differences Between AWS Config and CloudTrail

Compliance involves meeting regulatory standards, while security focuses on set measures that maintain the integrity and safety of AWS data and resources. AWS Config and CloudTrail can both help improve compliance and security, but they do so differently.

AWS Config promotes compliance and security by notifying you if resources don’t comply with the provided config rules. In contrast, CloudTrail informs you about unauthorized or suspicious activities. You could say that AWS Config is proactive and reactive, while CloudTrail is mostly retroactive.

Differences Between AWS Config and CloudTrail Based on Supported AWS Services

An AWS service is a functionally independent component offered on the AWS platform. Both AWS Config and CloudTrail support various other AWS services, and their support range mostly interlaps.

AWS Config supports services like Amazon EC2, ECR, ECS, Cognito, CloudWatch and CodeGuru. However, it doesn’t support features like the ECS service, ECS clusters, CodeCommit repository and CodDeploy app.

AWS CloudTrail supports EC2, ECS, EKS and Amazon S3, but it doesn’t work with Amazon VPC endpoint policy-specific events or AWS Import/Export.

Differences Between AWS Config and CloudTrail Based on Use Cases

AWS Config is suitable for resource configuration inventory, configuration evaluation and simple troubleshooting. On the other hand, CloudTrail is best used for security analysis, events auditing and deeper insights for troubleshooting.

The use cases of AWS Config and CloudTrail sometimes overlap, but Config leans toward ensuring compliance, while CloudTrail focuses on improving security.

Pricing Differences Between AWS Config and CloudTrail

AWS Config pricing is based on the number of configuration items recorded, conformance pack evaluations and active config rule assessments. CloudTrail is a bit more complex; its pricing varies with the features.

With CloudTrail Lake, the cost is based on the volume of data retained, but with Trails and Insights, you’re charged based on the number of events. That said, AWS CloudTrail has a free tier, but Config doesn’t.

How to Use AWS Config and CloudTrail Together?

AWS Config and CloudTrail work together synergistically, each with strengths that combine to create a well-rounded security, compliance and audit system. AWS Config endlessly monitors and records changes in resource configurations over time by keeping a history. However, AWS CloudTrail tracks API activities (and some non-API ones), taking note of the “who,” “what” and “when.”

When combined, AWS Config and CloudTrail give you comprehensive insights. Config shows you the current configurations and historical records of configuration changes. Then, CloudTrail lets you know who or what made those changes, what action led to the changes and when the changes happened.

Setting Up AWS Config and CloudTrail Together

Enable AWS Config and Define Config Rules: AWS CloudTrail is enabled in your AWS account by default, but AWS Config isn’t. To use them together, enable AWS Config. With Config enabled, you may choose to use AWS config rules (managed rules), or you could define custom config rules based on your configuration policies.
Add Amazon EventBridge and Amazon SQS: When setting up AWS Config and CloudTrail together, you need three services to relay the configuration change events from Config to CloudTrail: Amazon EventBridge, SQS and Lambda.
Amazon EventBridge captures change events from the AWS Config recorder and passes the message to an SQS queue.
Add AWS Lambda: Lambda polls the message from the SQS queue, processes it and triggers the CloudTrail LookupEvents API.
Using the resource identifier it gets from Lambda, CloudTrail LookupEvents API searches for and returns API events related to the resource. Next, Lambda gets the details of the API events from CloudTrail and parses them into plain text for the next step.
Add a Notification and Storage Service: The parsed event details from Lambda could be sent to a notification service like Amazon SNS or a storage service like Amazon S3 bucket.

What Are the Benefits of Using AWS Config and CloudTrail Together?

The main benefits of using both AWS config and CloudTrail are enhanced cloud computing security, comprehensive compliance and improved troubleshooting.

Enhanced security: When used together, Config and CloudTrail offer information for correlating configuration changes to the user, role or service that initiated them. They also help you figure out how and when these changes were made. This comprehensive knowledge enables you to detect and resolve suspicious activities much more swiftly and efficiently. Of course, this efficiency also enhances your cloud computing security.
Comprehensive compliance: With Config ensuring that your resources comply with defined policies and CloudTrail demonstrating user adherence, compliance is more thorough when you use AWS Config and CloudTrail together.
Improved troubleshooting: It’s much easier to figure out root causes and resolve them when using Config and CloudTrail. Config notifies you about the changes that occurred prior to an issue, while CloudTrail informs you of the actions that led to those changes. This minimizes the chances of a wild goose chase.

What Are the Main Differences Between AWS CloudWatch, Config and CloudTrail?

The main differences between AWS CloudWatch, Config and CloudTrail involve their data collection and use cases.

Data: AWS CloudWatch collects, evaluates and reports data about the health and performance of services. Config focuses on configuration data, and CloudTrail mostly monitors API activity.
Use Cases: CloudWatch monitors application performance, identifies optimization opportunities, sets performance alerts and assists with troubleshooting. Config is used for configuration management, configuration analysis and compliance assessment, and CloudTrail works for security and compliance audits, investigations and tracking.

What Are the Different AWS Services for Logging and Monitoring?

There are various AWS services for logging and monitoring, including AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudWatch Logs, AWS CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, Amazon GuardDuty and AWS X-Ray.

AWS CloudWatch

CloudWatch is a service that analyzes logs and monitors metrics to evaluate the health and performance of applications and services in an AWS environment.

AWS CloudWatch Logs

CWLogs — CloudWatch Logs offers a centralized location for
logs from apps, systems and services.

CloudWatch Logs centralizes logs from applications, systems and services for easier monitoring. It retains logs indefinitely, making it a perfect archive.

AWS CloudTrail

ct dashboard — In an AWS environment, AWS CloudTrail logs various activities
and supports security and compliance.

AWS CloudTrail monitors and logs various activities — particularly, API activities — in an AWS environment. It’s typically used for security and compliance auditing as well as investigations, but it’s also useful for troubleshooting and improving security posture.

VPC Flow Logs

VPC Flow Logs monitor and record IP traffic across network interfaces in a VPC. They help detect excessively restrictive network security rules and determine the flow of traffic.

AWS X-Ray

AWS X-Ray collects trace data from instrumented applications, including calls and responses made to microservices, databases, web APIs and AWS resources. It’s used to monitor performance, map application architecture and investigate issues.

Amazon GuardDuty

Amazon GuardDuty uses machine learning to monitor AWS accounts, services and S3 workloads for threats. GuardDuty also responds to these threats and aids security investigations.

Final Thoughts

The primary difference between AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail involves the data that they handle: Config handles configuration state data, while CloudTrail logs API activities. Individually, these services are useful for compliance, security and troubleshooting; but when used together, they’re even better.

What’s your go-to configuration management tool in the cloud? In your opinion, what cloud monitoring or logging tool is the most innovative so far? Let us know your thoughts in a comment below, and as always, thank you for reading.

FAQ: AWS CloudTrail vs Config

CloudTrail is an activity logging service, while Config is a configuration monitoring service.
While AWS Config monitors configuration states, CloudWatch monitors health and performance.
CloudFormation is an AWS Infrastructure-as-Code tool, and Config is a configuration monitoring tool.
CloudWatch monitors health and performance, whereas CloudTrail monitors activity (mostly AWS API activity).

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