Skeddly Blog

Archive Logs to Amazon S3

From its beginning, Skeddly has been logging all action activity in your Skeddly account. You can view any of these logs at any time within Skeddly, and you can download them individually, or in a monthly package. For many organizations, these logs are invaluable in their auditing strategies, much like CloudTrail is.

Starting today, we’re making it even easier for you to retain your own copy of your action logs. You can now archive your action logs to an Amazon S3 bucket in your AWS account.

Archiving your logs can be useful for a number of reasons:

• Keeping an audit trail of activity in your AWS account
• Feeding your logs into Elasticsearch or other search tool to enable searching of the logs

You can enable action log archiving by doing the following:

1. Sign-in to your Skeddly account using a user that has permissions to modify account settings.
2. Click “Account Settings” in the top-right of the page.
3. In the “Account Options” section, click “Archiving”.
4. For the “Archiving Method” field, choose “Amazon S3”.
5. In the “Bucket Name” field, specify the name of the S3 bucket to which logs should be archived.
6. In the “Object Key” field, specify the name of the log file. In this field, we allow many macros to be used, so you can customize where they are located in your bucket:
   • $(YEAR), $(MONTH), $(DAY), $(DATE), $(TIME) - UTC time macros for the action’s end date.
   • $(ACTIONNAME) - Name of the action executed.
   • $(ACTIONID) - ID of the action.
   • $(ACTIONEXECUTIONID) - ID of the action execution.
   • $(CREDENTIALNAME) - Name of the AWS credentials used by the action.
   • $(REGION) - Name of the AWS region used by the action.
7. In the “Credential” field, choose the AWS credentials used to save the logs to your S3 bucket.
8. You can also choose to gzip compress your logs and/or use server-side AES256 encryption.

Once saved, your logs will be archived to your bucket as action executions complete.

You should also run Skeddly’s IAM Policy Generator to generate an updated policy for AWS credentials. This will give them the permissions necessary to write the logs to your bucket. This is a sample policy that would allow your AWS credentials to write to your bucket:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Action": [
        "s3:GetBucketLocation",
        "s3:PutObject"
      ],
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Resource": "*"
    }
  ]
}

Archiving is available starting today to everyone at no additional charge.

About Skeddly

Skeddly is the leading scheduling service for your AWS account. Using Skeddly, you can:

• Reduce your AWS costs,
• Schedule snapshots and images, and
• Automate many DevOps and IT tasks.

Sign-up for our 30 day free trial or sign-in to your Skeddly account to get started.

By Matt Houser on Feb 9, 2017 in Announcements, Features, Security | Permalink