Category: Technical How-to

You can use rules in Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights to gain security visibility into your VPC flow logs. The rules analyze flow logs in targeted groups in Amazon CloudWatch Logs and display the Top-N contributors for a given log field or combination of log fields. In this post, I’ll show you how to set up CloudWatch Contributor Insight rules for VPC flow logs. I’ll demonstrate how to:

Map the VPC flow log format to rules in Contributor Insights.
Explain how a single rule can be used to monitor many VPC flow logs.
Walk through some sample rules and show them in a CloudWatch dashboard.

Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards are a great way to monitor your AWS resources. During peak events when you are expecting high traffic, monitoring your AWS resources helps you stay ahead of any issues that may arise. You might want a customized and automated dashboard that can be used during a seasonal event, important releases, holidays, and […]

In this blog post, we share a procedure for configuring AWS Systems Manager Session Manager run as support for Active Directory (AD) federated users using AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) session tags. We show you how to start a Session Manager session using the AD user name of the federated user on an AD-joined […]

Each AWS service requires explicit access to resources, endpoints, and objects that reside in the domain of another service. This is referred to as the permission boundary. Services like AWS Config, Amazon Macie, and AWS GuardDuty require an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role that grants access to resources outside of its control. Understanding […]

In this guest blog post, Herman Lee (Cloud Solution Architect, VP) and Nauman Noor (Managing Director) from the public cloud engineering team at State Street discuss their use of AWS Systems Manager Session Manager for privileged access management of Amazon EC2 instances. State Street Corporation is a financial services company responsible for the management, custody, […]

Active Directory administrators are accustomed to managing domain resources using Remote Server Administrators Tools (RSAT) installed on either their workstations or a member server in the domain. When it comes to managing resources on a managed Active Directory service, such as the case with AWS Managed Microsoft AD, these tools must be available for administrators […]

Many organizations get access to their AWS resources using a Direct Connect connection or a Site-to-Site VPN. AWS Site-to-Site VPN creates a secure connection between your data center or branch office and your AWS cloud resources.  In this post, we will see how to monitor your Cisco CSR VPN tunnel and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) […]

Many customers deploy applications with a multitude of resources using AWS CloudFormation templates.  As customers begin to scale, these templates are often re-used across multiple applications.  At this point, important tasks like identifying deployed applications and understanding which CloudFormation stacks are associated with an application become more difficult. Visibility is an important component of a […]

Amazon DevOps Guru, now in preview, is an ML-powered cloud operations service that assists you in improving application availability. It’s easy to set up and use, and leverages machine learning models informed by years of operational expertise in building, scaling, and maintaining highly available applications at Amazon.com. DevOps Guru continuously analyzes streams of disparate data […]

Are you using macOS for developing, building, testing, and signing applications for Apple devices? To all the thriving community of millions of developers worldwide building applications on Apple platforms, we at AWS bring you the first ever macOS based compute environments in the public cloud. Yes, you read that right! You can now run macOS […]