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What's the Difference Between AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch?

Compare AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

Compare side-by-side

Comparisons
AWS CloudTrail
Amazon CloudWatch
Category

Management & Governance, Audit & activity logging

Management & Governance, Observability / monitoring
Description

Audit trail for governance, compliance, and security monitoring across AWS accounts

Observability tool to collect metrics, logs, and events across AWS, multicloud, and hybrid environments
Best for
  • Audit logging
  • Compliance
  • Security analysis
  • Operational troubleshooting
  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • Application monitoring
  • Log analytics
  • Alerting
Key features
  • Event history
  • CloudTrail Lake
  • Insights
  • Organization trails
  • Data events
  • Metrics
  • Logs
  • Alarms
  • Dashboards
  • ServiceLens
Pricing model

First trail free; pay per event + storage

Pay per metric, dashboard, alarm, log data ingested
Free tier

Yes

Yes
Expert take

“CloudTrail records every API call (who did what, when, from where). CloudTrail Lake lets you run SQL queries across years of events. Enable organization trails to capture all accounts and use Insights to detect unusual API activity patterns automatically.”
— Gary McLean, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“CloudWatch is the default observability backbone for AWS. Every service emits metrics automatically; you just need to decide what to alarm on. Logs Insights lets you query log groups with a SQL-like syntax. For Prometheus-compatible metrics or Grafana dashboards, use the managed services alongside it.”
— Didier Durand, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]
Product page

Learn more about AWS CloudTrail »

Learn more about Amazon CloudWatch »

When to use AWS CloudTrail or Amazon CloudWatch

Use AWS CloudTrail when:

  • Audit logging
  • Compliance
  • Security analysis
  • Operational troubleshooting

Learn more about AWS CloudTrail »

Use Amazon CloudWatch when:

  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • Application monitoring
  • Log analytics
  • Alerting

Learn more about Amazon CloudWatch »

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