--- title: AWS CloudTrail Reviews meta_title: 'AWS CloudTrail Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 106 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how AWS CloudTrail works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.4 review_count: 106 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-13' parent_category: name: Development url: https://www.g2.com/categories/development --- # AWS CloudTrail Reviews **Vendor:** Amazon Web Services (AWS) **Category:** [Other Development Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/other-development) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 106 ## About AWS CloudTrail AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of your AWS account. It records actions taken by users, roles, or AWS services as events, capturing API calls made via the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface, and AWS SDKs. This comprehensive logging provides visibility into user activity and resource changes, facilitating security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting. Key Features and Functionality: - Event History: Provides a viewable, searchable, and downloadable record of the past 90 days of management events in an AWS Region, allowing users to monitor and review recent account activity without additional setup. - Trails: Enables continuous recording of events by creating trails that deliver log files to an Amazon S3 bucket. Trails can be configured to capture management events, data events, and insights events, offering flexibility in monitoring specific activities. - CloudTrail Lake: A managed data lake that allows for the aggregation, storage, and analysis of events. It supports SQL-based querying and integrates with services like Amazon Athena for advanced analytics. - Insights: Detects unusual activity by analyzing management events and identifying anomalies in API call volumes or error rates, aiding in proactive security and operational monitoring. - Integration with AWS Services: Seamlessly integrates with other AWS services such as Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Lambda, and Amazon EventBridge, enabling automated responses to specific events and enhancing monitoring capabilities. Primary Value and Problem Solved: AWS CloudTrail addresses the critical need for transparency and accountability within AWS environments. By providing detailed records of user and service activities, it helps organizations meet compliance requirements, enhance security posture, and efficiently troubleshoot operational issues. The service's ability to detect anomalies and integrate with other AWS services ensures that users can proactively manage and secure their cloud resources. ## AWS CloudTrail Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users find AWS CloudTrail's **ease of use** remarkable, facilitating quick implementation and comprehensive activity tracking. (16 reviews) - Users value the **comprehensive logging** capabilities of AWS CloudTrail, enhancing event tracking and service integration. (16 reviews) - Users value the **comprehensive security logging** of AWS CloudTrail, enhancing visibility into activities and API calls. (12 reviews) - Users find **monitoring capabilities** of AWS CloudTrail essential for audits, troubleshooting, and recording user activity effectively. (11 reviews) - Users find **easy integrations** with AWS services incredibly beneficial for managing logs and compliance efficiently. (6 reviews) - Data Management (5 reviews) - API Management (4 reviews) - Users value the **broad event coverage** of AWS CloudTrail, enhancing audits and security investigations with comprehensive insights. (4 reviews) - Customer Support (4 reviews) - Users find the **ease of implementation** of AWS CloudTrail beneficial for enhancing security and operational efficiency. (4 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find the **inadequate logging retention** of AWS CloudTrail limiting, especially for growing applications and cost management. (14 reviews) - Users find AWS CloudTrail **expensive** , especially with additional storage costs and limitations on log retention. (8 reviews) - Users express frustration with **data limitations** in AWS CloudTrail, needing better access and longer retention for logs. (5 reviews) - Users experience **notable project delays** due to latency in log delivery, affecting real-time analysis and debugging. (4 reviews) - Users find the **complexity of configuration and log interpretation** challenging, especially for those new to AWS. (3 reviews) - Difficult Learning (3 reviews) - Poor UI (3 reviews) - API Management (2 reviews) - Difficult Configuration (2 reviews) - Users find the **limited filters** in AWS CloudTrail somewhat restrictive, though they still fulfill basic needs. (2 reviews) ## AWS CloudTrail Reviews ### 1. Getting Started **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudTrail?** Easy set-up, output easy to use, great for initial migration **What do you dislike about AWS CloudTrail?** Can be hard to decipher, basic in output, connections **What problems is AWS CloudTrail solving and how is that benefiting you?** Logging and Monitoring ### 2. Insights on your AWS account activity **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2017 **What do you like best about AWS CloudTrail?** AWS CloudTrail is a service that helps you monitoring your AWS account activity, with a focus on critical operations / API call, in order to build security checks on top of it. For us, this is the entrypoint of our AWS account security monitoring system. Being able to track all critical activities (ie. changes on EC2, VPC, or any other AWS service) help us to identify "who is doing what" on the platform. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudTrail?** AWS CloudTrail allows you to store events on S3. The data structure used to stored such events on S3 is non-trivial and parsing them requires some knowledge and experience about the monitored service (since CloudTrail is just a log of events/activities of AWS services you use). **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudTrail:** First of all identify which kind of information you want to extract from AWS CloudTrail events. Then, read the documentation about the events data structure and build your parser / analyzer on top of that. **What problems is AWS CloudTrail solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use CloudTrail to monitor our AWS account activity. When you run a large scale infrastructure it's quite common to have a lot of different applications interacting with AWS services. Having a log of all such events is the entrypoint to look for suspicious activities. ### 3. Frustrating **Rating:** 0.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Human Resources | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 11, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudTrail?** The organization of any required data is simple to read and decipher. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudTrail?** Completing a basic task is frustrating when using this system, I wouldn’t recommend to anyone needing a quick result. Seems like the more you try to use the system, the slower it runs. **What problems is AWS CloudTrail solving and how is that benefiting you?** Monitoring business client sales/projections ### 4. Good **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 12, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudTrail?** Easy to use and user friendly they given lots of facilities **What do you dislike about AWS CloudTrail?** Enhanced the languages.not only English .give translate **What problems is AWS CloudTrail solving and how is that benefiting you?** Actually I learned ### 5. Log everything **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Adam . | Architekt rozwiązań IT - Departament Rozwoju Infrastruktury, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 10, 2017 **What do you like best about AWS CloudTrail?** You can log every API call made by your users and run certain actions when selected events occurs. All API calls are included does't matter if it's from web console, AWS SDK or CLI. It integrates easily with other AWS services like SNS or Lambda. It's simple but very powerful when used correctly. You can set automatic reactions to some potentially harmful API calls to stop the threat before it endanger your AWS infrastructure. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudTrail?** Build in tools for reading, searching and visualising cloud trail logs would be greatly appreciated cause raw request stored in S3 bucket are hard to find and read. It would be nice if cloud trail could write logs directly to Aurora or Dynamo DB. Unchangeable limit of 5 trails for region could be obstacle as well. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudTrail:** It's simple but useful and needed in every organisation using AWS services. **What problems is AWS CloudTrail solving and how is that benefiting you?** Auditing AWS environment, monitoring user and application activity. ### 6. Great tool for auditing your configuration in the cloud **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sheehan A. | Software Engineering Manager, Pro Team Services, Sports, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 23, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudTrail?** AWS CloudTrail gives you an automated way of logging everything that is changing within your infrastructure. As more and more workloads move to the cloud, there needs to be a way to track these changes for post-mortem and auditing purposes. Cloud Trail provides a clean way to visualize and store these types of logs for later analysis. One of the great benefits is that it can log API calls, so even your web applications that interface with AWS can be monitored. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudTrail?** The GUI tool to view CloudTrail logs can be cumbersome as the volume of data is large. There needs to be a better way to visualize and retrieve information. Many companies use 3rd party dashboards or CLI tools to do post-processing and manipulation of the log data. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudTrail:** CloudTrail is cheap. Be sure to enable cloud trail logging for all of your infrastructure and applications. It is better to have logs up front, before a disaster occurs, than to enable it after the fact. There is no reason to not enable cloud trail logging if you are in the cloud in AWS. **What problems is AWS CloudTrail solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are trying to make sure our auditing and configuration monitoring process is predictable so that we can put standard controls in place to make our cloud infrastructure more compliant. ## AWS CloudTrail Discussions - [What is AWS CloudTrail used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-aws-cloudtrail-used-for) - 1 comment - [Is AWS CloudTrail free?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-aws-cloudtrail-free) - 1 comment - [What is CloudWatch vs CloudTrail?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-cloudwatch-vs-cloudtrail) - 2 comments - [View AWS CloudTrail pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-cloudtrail/reviews?page=3§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-15+22%3A46%3A32+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=2972ff41-ad0c-434e-bd06-729c07b05eef&secure%5Btoken%5D=b08184841f391af954e94b12fc42ea048d459c8d5f65fb9561e8eeedb5f3ddc0&format=llm_user) ## AWS CloudTrail Integrations - [Amazon AWS Platform](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-aws-platform/reviews) - [Amazon CloudWatch](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-cloudwatch/reviews) - [AWS Auto Scaling](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-auto-scaling/reviews) - [AWS Cloud9](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-cloud9/reviews) - [AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK)](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-cloud-development-kit-aws-cdk/reviews) - [AWS CloudFormation](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-aws-cloudformation/reviews) - [AWS Elastic Beanstalk](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-elastic-beanstalk/reviews) - [AWS Fargate](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-fargate/reviews) - [AWS Glue](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-glue/reviews) - [AWS Lambda](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-lambda/reviews) - [CrowdStrike Falcon Endpoint Protection Platform](https://www.g2.com/products/crowdstrike-falcon-endpoint-protection-platform/reviews) ## Top AWS CloudTrail Alternatives - [Okta](https://www.g2.com/products/okta/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (1,287 reviews) - [Termius](https://www.g2.com/products/termius/reviews) - 4.8/5.0 (261 reviews) - [SAP Fiori](https://www.g2.com/products/sap-fiori/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (128 reviews)