Audit and accountability in Amazon EC2

AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, and AWS Config Rules provide audit and change tracking features for auditing AWS resource changes. Configure Windows event logs to send local log files to a centralized log management system to preserve log data for security and operational behavior analysis. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) aggregates information about Microsoft applications deployed to Windows instances and applies preconfigured and custom rulesets based on application roles and services. System Center Management Packs build on SCOM to provide application-specific monitoring and configuration guidance. These Management Packs support Windows Server Active Directory, SharePoint Server 2013, Exchange Server 2013, Lync Server 2013, SQL Server 2014, and many more servers and technologies.

In addition to Microsoft systems management tools, customers can use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor instance CPU utilization, disk performance, network I/O, and perform host and instance status checks. The EC2Config, EC2Launch, and EC2Launch v2 launch agents provide access to additional, advanced features for Windows instances. For example, they can export Windows system, security, application, and Internet Information Services (IIS) logs to CloudWatch Logs which can then be integrated with Amazon CloudWatch metrics and alarms. Customers can also create scripts that export Windows performance counters to Amazon CloudWatch custom metrics.