title: How to make sense out of AWS CloudTrail costs
body: <p>I'm responsible for two AWS accounts where a web service is run in two different environments. I'm now trying to have a look at cutting costs, and I'm a bit confused as to how to make sense of the CloudTrail costs, i.e., break it down into different categories etc, and also if there are some common pitfalls when it comes to high CloudTrail costs.</p>
  <p>For example, my company's security department is running some monitoring SW in my accounts - both internal like GuardDuty and external, and I think these tools are responsible for a lot of this cost. I'd like to be able to chart down exactly which of these costs are attributed to tools that I am in no control of (and consequently which I may be able to reduce), and which are due to infrastructure I'm responsible of. Right now, CloudTrail costs are the single highest item, and I think it seems odd that we're paying more for it than what our combined cost is for EC2 + Lambda + DynamoDB + S3.</p>
  <p>When looking at the CloudTrail event stream itself, most events don't hold that much information useful for me to understand why this event is sent or to group them in a bar chart by &quot;monitoring tool&quot; vs &quot;normal operation&quot;. There's basically an event source and a user name. At a glance, a large portion of events seem to be CreateLogStream and UpdateInstanceInformation, which are likely due to normal operation of some of the services?</p>
  <p>If it turns out simple events such as CreateLogStream are costing thousands of dollars, how should I attack this problem? Is it possible to manually disable certain CloudTrail events? Is there a best practice as to what events are important and which are not? I mean, I never use CloudTrails for anything during normal operation, but it feels nice to have them in case something nasty happens.</p>