AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Snehal Nahar

Author: Snehal Nahar

Snehal Nahar is a Principal Technical Account Manager at AWS. She specializes in Cloud Operations and Security. She is passionate about building innovative solutions using AWS services to help customers achieve their business objectives. She enjoys spending time with family and friends, playing board games and watching TV.

Gain Insights with Natural Language Query into your AWS environment using Amazon CloudTrail and Amazon Q in QuickSight

AWS CloudTrail tracks user and API activities across your AWS environments for governance and auditing purposes. Large enterprises typically use multiple AWS accounts, and many of those accounts might need access to a data lake managed by a single AWS account. By using Lake Formation integration with CloudTrail Lake, you can securely aggregate the data […]

Ingesting activity events from non-AWS sources to AWS CloudTrail Lake

AWS CloudTrail Lake is a managed data lake for capturing, storing, accessing, and analyzing user and API activity on AWS for audit, security, and operational purposes. You can aggregate and immutably store your activity events, and run SQL-based queries for search and analysis. In Jan 2023, AWS announced the support of ingestion for activity events […]

Automate AWS Config reporting for noncompliant resources that have been non-compliant for a period of time

AWS Config evaluates the configuration settings of your AWS resources. You do this by creating AWS Config rules, which represent your ideal configuration settings. AWS Config provides customizable, predefined rules called AWS Managed Rules to help you get started. While AWS Config continuously tracks the configuration changes that occur among your resources, it checks whether […]

Cost Optimization recommendations for AWS Config

In this post, we’ll walk you through the various best practices and recommendations for optimizing AWS Config costs. This also provides technical guidance for looking at the rules and the recorder, how to start deleting or removing rules that aren’t needed, and then editing the Settings of Config, specifically the “Resource types to record”, to […]

Announcing AWS Config Compliance Scores for conformance pack

Back in November 2019, we announced AWS Config Conformance Packs, which is a collection of AWS Config rules and remediation actions that can be easily deployed as a single entity in an account and a region or across an organization in AWS Organizations. Conformance Packs have helped AWS customers to manage and enforce compliance of […]

Using AWS CloudTrail Lake to identify older TLS connections to AWS service endpoints

To comply with regulatory standards and follow security best practices, organizations have told us that they want to ensure they have disabled older versions of Transport Layer Security (TLS), such as TLS 1.0 and 1.1, and only use modern TLS 1.2 and 1.3. When connecting to AWS API endpoints, your client software negotiates its preferred TLS version, […]

Mapping Microsoft SCCM compliance checks to AWS Config

Microsoft SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager) enables the management, deployment, and security of devices and applications. Compliance settings in Configuration Manager lets you manage configuration and compliance in your organization. As customers migrate their traditional workloads, they’re also looking for an AWS native solution that provides the flexibility to manage compliance and configuration management on […]

How to create a change template using AWS Systems Manager Change Manager

How to create a change template using AWS Systems Manager Change Manager

AWS Systems Manager Change Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, is an enterprise change management framework for requesting, approving, implementing, and reporting on operational changes to your application configuration and infrastructure. With Change Manager, you can use preapproved change templates to help automate change processes for your resources and help avoid unintentional results when […]

Figure 1: CloudTrail Process Flow

How to optimize AWS CloudTrail costs by using advanced event selectors

AWS CloudTrail can be used for security, monitoring restricted API calls, notification of threshold breaches, operational issues, filtering mechanisms for isolating data, faster root cause identification, and speedy resolution. CloudTrail can also be used for various compliance and governance controls, by helping you achieve compliance by logging API calls and changes to resources. Event selectors […]