Monitoring application access logs

Amplify stores access logs for all of the apps you host in Amplify. Access logs contain information about requests that are made to your hosted apps. Amplify retains all access logs for an app until you delete the app. All access logs for an app are available in the Amplify console. However, each individual request for access logs is limited to a two week time period that you specify.

Amplify never reuses CloudFront distributions between customers. Amplify creates CloudFront distributions in advance so that you don't have to wait for a CloudFront distribution to be created when you deploy a new app. Before these distributions are assigned to an Amplify app, they might receive traffic from bots. However, they're configured to always respond as Not found before they're assigned. If your app's access logs contain entries for a time period before you created your app, these entries are related to this activity.

Important

We recommend that you use the logs to understand the nature of the requests for your content, not as a complete accounting of all requests. Amplify delivers access logs on a best-effort basis. The log entry for a particular request might be delivered long after the request was actually processed and, in rare cases, a log entry might not be delivered at all. When a log entry is omitted from access logs, the number of entries in the access logs won't match the usage that appears in the AWS billing and usage reports.

Retrieving an app's access logs

Use the following procedure to retrieve access logs for an Amplify app.

To view access logs

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amplify console.

2. Choose the app that you want to view access logs for.

3. In the navigation pane, choose Hosting, then choose Monitoring.

4. On the Monitoring page, choose Access logs.

5. Choose Edit time range.

6. In the Edit time range window do the following.

   1. For Start date, specify the first day of the two week interval to retrieve logs for.

   2. For Start time, choose the time on the first day to start the log retrieval.

   3. Choose Confirm.

7. The Amplify console displays the logs for your specified time range in the Access logs section. Choose Download to save the logs in a CSV format.

Analyzing access logs

To analyze access logs you can store the CSV files in an Amazon S3 bucket. One way to analyze your access logs is to use Athena. Athena is an interactive query service that can help you analyze data for AWS services. You can follow the step-by-step instructions here to create a table. Once your table has been created, you can query data as follows.

SELECT SUM(bytes) AS total_bytes
FROM logs
WHERE "date" BETWEEN DATE '2018-06-09' AND DATE '2018-06-11'
LIMIT 100;