Viewing events with CloudTrail Event history
You can troubleshoot operational and security incidents in the CloudTrail console by viewing Event history. The Event history provides a viewable, searchable, downloadable, and immutable record of the past 90 days of recorded API activity (management events) in an AWS Region.
You can look up events related to the creation, modification, or deletion of resources (such as IAM users or Amazon EC2 instances) in your AWS account on a by-Region basis. You can view events and download them with the AWS CloudTrail console. You can customize the view of event history in the console by selecting which columns to display or hide. You can programmatically look up events by using the AWS SDKs or AWS Command Line Interface. You can also compare the details of events in Event history side-by-side.
CloudTrail logging varies between AWS services. While most AWS services support CloudTrail logging
of all events, some services only support logging a subset of APIs and events, and a few
services are unsupported. For example, some AWS services log a
ThrottlingException
when API requests are throttled, while other AWS
services do not. You can learn more about the specifics of how CloudTrail logs events for a
specific service by consulting the documentation for that service. For more information, see
CloudTrail supported services and integrations.
Note
Over time, AWS services might add additional events. CloudTrail records these events in Event history, but a full 90-day record of activity that includes added events won't be available until 90 days after it adds the events.
This section describes how to look up events by using the CloudTrail console and the AWS CLI. It
also describes how to download a file of events. For information on using the
LookupEvents
API to retrieve information from CloudTrail events, see the
AWS CloudTrail API Reference.
For information on creating a trail so that you have a record of events that extends past 90 days, see Creating a trail and Getting and viewing your CloudTrail log files.