AWS Cloud Operations Blog

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 […]

When you run an application on multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, you want to avoid differences between the instances because they can cause unpredictable behavior and make it hard to troubleshoot and solve issues. The best way to prevent differences is to replace your instances whenever you want to make a change—to […]

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 […]

If you migrate your workloads to the cloud to modernize your applications or secure infrastructure and operations, you’ll find these migrations are increasingly performed with a DevOps methodology that incorporates continuous development, integration, and testing. It is always a best practice to incorporate security as code in your DevOps workflows to uncover security issues when […]

Datalex is an industry leader of omni-channel retail solutions for airlines around the world. The Datalex product portfolio supports end-to-end retail capabilities that include pricing, shopping, and order management. This year, Datalex’s multi-year deal with their API provider was up for renewal. As part of a best practice review, they considered other options. When the […]

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) […]