Introduction to Amazon GuardDuty
Tags: aws, cloud, security, devops
Published: 2022-01-21 17:38:39

Security is an essential priority for any company, and with increasing cloud adoption, companies need to take serious measures to secure and protect their data. This is where GuardDuty comes into the picture, allowing you to monitor your AWS account for any unusual and unexpected behaviour.

In this blog, we will discuss Amazon GuardDuty and cover topics like:

**What is Amazon GuardDuty
Features of Amazon GuardDuty
Benefits of AWS GuardDuty
Pricing
Working With Amazon GuardDuty**

## What is Amazon GuardDuty

AWS offers GuardDuty as a managed service for threat detection, enabling continuous monitoring to protect your AWS accounts and data stored in S3. It does this by analyzing data (account and network activity) found in VPC Flow Logs, DNS Logs, and AWS CloudTrail Events. It also has a threat detection mechanism to detect anomalies and malicious IP addresses, plus it utilizes machine learning for more accurate threat detection.

One of the key benefits of using GuardDuty is that it continuously monitors your AWS accounts for threats and anomalies. Another advantage is that it works completely independently from your resources; you don't need to enable any service or install any software, and there's no performance overhead on your workload. On top of that, alerts provided by GuardDuty are detailed and actionable and can be easily integrated with your existing event management and workflow systems.

![Logo](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/qblc9o3somfk14fivxg9.jpg)

## Features of Amazon GuradDuty

1. Highly available threat detection.
2. Automate threat response and remediation.
3. Continuous monitoring across AWS accounts without added cost & complexity.

## Benefits of AWS GuardDuty

**1. Enable continuous monitoring and analysis** - Gain insight into security events with findings that provide context, metadata, and details on impacted resources.
**2. Simplify forensics** - Quickly determine the root cause of suspicious activities using Amazon GuardDuty's console integration with Amazon Detective.
**3. Stop unauthorized activity** - Guard against the use of compromised credentials, unusual data access in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), API calls from known malicious IP addresses, and more.

## Pricing

AWS provides a complimentary full access 30 day trial of the service upon the first activation so you can see if it's a good fit for you. To estimate the costs after that, Amazon GuardDuty generates an estimated price for how much you would have spent without the free trial.

The Pricing is based on the amount of analysis of your AWS log data. VPC Flow Logs and DNS Logs will be charged per GB/month, and the CloudTrail Event Logs will be charged per 1,000,000 events/month. Even though Pricing can differ from region to region, in general, it consists of the following:

![Pricing](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/rssh07b8tvkofi8l9uuy.jpg)

## Working With Amazon GuardDuty

![Working of GuradDuty](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/np5540azh1zxs3uiktv1.png)

First, GuardDuty determines the issue, and it generates a finding. These findings show up in the Amazon GuardDuty Management Console and can be sent to Amazon CloudWatch as an event. This flexibility means that you can quickly review findings and react to them.

## Conclusion

AWS GuardDuty can detect and report malicious activities in the AWS account and workload. This managed service identifies and reports undesired activities to the administrator.

I hope this gives you an Introduction to Amazon GuardDuty.

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