AWS Secrets Manager Monitoring: Key Aspects

AWS Secrets Manager is a service designed to securely store, manage, and retrieve credentials, API keys, and other secrets. Monitoring and troubleshooting activities within Secrets Manager are crucial for maintaining security, compliance, and operational efficiency. Here's a summary of the key points from the lecture on monitoring Secrets Manager using AWS CloudTrail, CloudWatch Logs, and CloudWatch alarms:

CloudTrail Integration with Secrets Manager

• API Calls: CloudTrail captures all API calls to the Secrets Manager API, providing a record of who accessed what secrets and when.
• Non-API Service Events: Unique to Secrets Manager, these events are recorded by CloudTrail to help with security, compliance, and operational troubleshooting. They include:
  • RotationStarted
  • RotationSucceeded
  • RotationFailed
  • RotationAbandoned (occurs when a manual change is made to a target secret instead of using automated rotation)
  • StartSecretVersionDelete
  • CancelSecretVersionDelete
  • EndSecretVersionDelete

Monitoring and Alerting

• CloudWatch Logs and Alarms: CloudTrail logs can be stored in CloudWatch Logs. From there, you can create metric filters to monitor specific events, such as RotationFailed.
• Metric Filters and Alarms: By creating a metric filter for RotationFailed events and setting a CloudWatch alarm, you can receive notifications via Amazon SNS when these events occur, allowing for prompt response to issues.

Troubleshooting Secrets Rotation

• Lambda Function Integration: Secrets Manager uses AWS Lambda functions to perform secret rotations. If a rotation fails, it's crucial to investigate why.
• Logs for Debugging:
  • CloudTrail: Provides a record of the rotation event and any errors.
  • Lambda Logs: Contains detailed execution logs and error messages, making it the primary resource for debugging rotation issues.

Practical Steps for Alerting on Rotation Failures

1. CloudTrail to CloudWatch Logs: Ensure CloudTrail logs are stored in CloudWatch Logs.
2. Create Metric Filter: Set up a metric filter in CloudWatch Logs to detect RotationFailed events.
3. Configure CloudWatch Alarm: Create a CloudWatch alarm based on the metric filter. Configure it to send notifications via SNS when the alarm is triggered.

Summary

Monitoring and troubleshooting Secrets Manager involves leveraging CloudTrail for recording API and non-API events, using CloudWatch Logs for storage and analysis, and setting up CloudWatch alarms for proactive alerting on critical events like rotation failures. Additionally, Lambda function logs are invaluable for detailed debugging of rotation issues.