CLF-C02 Practice Question 35: API Activity Audit
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 4 · question 5 of 10
A production Amazon EC2 instance was terminated overnight, and nobody on the operations team admits to doing it. The manager needs to find out which IAM user or role made the termination request, and at what time. Which AWS service provides this information?
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Answer:
AWS CloudTrail records actions taken by a user, a role or an AWS service as events. That includes actions in the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, and the AWS SDKs and APIs. Each event shows who or what took the action, which resources it acted on, and when. CloudTrail Event history is available automatically, at no charge, and holds the past 90 days of management events in a Region, so the TerminateInstances call can be looked up straight away.
Option B, Amazon CloudWatch, collects metrics, logs and alarms about how resources and applications are *performing*. It could show that the instance stopped reporting metrics, but not which identity terminated it. Option C, Amazon Inspector, scans workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure; it does not record account activity. Option D, VPC Flow Logs, captures information about IP traffic to and from network interfaces in a VPC. It does not record AWS API calls such as terminating an instance.
Reference: What Is AWS CloudTrail?