Logging and monitoring in AWS WAF

This section explains how to use AWS tools for monitoring and responding to events in AWS WAF.

Monitoring is an important part of maintaining the reliability, availability, and performance of AWS WAF and your AWS solutions. You should collect monitoring data from all parts of your AWS solution so that you can more easily debug a multi-point failure if one occurs. AWS provides several tools for monitoring your AWS WAF resources and responding to potential events:

Amazon CloudWatch alarms

Using CloudWatch alarms, you watch a single metric over a time period that you specify. If the metric exceeds a given threshold, CloudWatch sends a notification to an Amazon SNS topic or AWS Auto Scaling policy. For more information, see Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch.

AWS CloudTrail logs

CloudTrail provides a record of actions taken by a user, role, or an AWS service in AWS WAF. Using the information collected by CloudTrail, you can determine the request that was made to AWS WAF, the IP address from which the request was made, who made the request, when it was made, and additional details. For more information, see Logging API calls with AWS CloudTrail.

AWS WAF web ACL traffic logging

AWS WAF offers logging for the traffic that your web ACLs analyze. The logs include information such as the time that AWS WAF received the request from your protected AWS resource, detailed information about the request, and the action setting for the rule that the request matched. For more information, see Logging AWS WAF web ACL traffic.