Cloud Monitoring Readiness Checker – Audit Logging & Telemetry

The Cloud Security Monitoring & Telemetry Readiness Checker evaluates an organization’s cloud logging infrastructure against industry best practices. It checks whether critical telemetry sources—including cloud management plane events, virtual private cloud (VPC) network traffic flows, managed Kubernetes audit trails, and serverless invocations—are enabled, protected against tampering, and actively forwarded to security operations centers.

The tool benchmarks logging pipelines against NIST Special Publication 800-92 (Guide to Computer Security Log Management) and CIS Cloud Provider Benchmarks, highlighting gaps such as unencrypted log archives, disabled log integrity validation, or missing egress alerting.

A critical risk during cloud compromises is log tampering: adversaries with administrative credentials frequently attempt to stop log trails or delete audit logs to eliminate forensic evidence. To counter this threat, cloud architectures implement two mandatory controls: cryptographic log digest validation and cross-account log centralization.

With digest validation (such as AWS CloudTrail log file validation), every hour the provider generates a SHA-256 hash digest of all log files delivered and signs it with a private key. Any modification or deletion of a log file invalidates the cryptographic hash chain. Furthermore, forwarding logs to a separate, isolated AWS account protected by strict Service Control Policies (SCPs) prevents compromised production credentials from altering audit archives.