Cloudwatch

If you’ve ever set up CloudTrail and just… left the default CloudWatch Logs integration running, you’re probably paying more than you need to. I know I was. The setup is almost too easy - CloudTrail ships events to a CloudWatch log group, you get a unified place to search logs, maybe you wire up a few metric filters for alerts. Done. Except the bill quietly grows every month and you don’t really notice until you actually look at it.

Logging is part of every application, at least they should, but often logs contain sensitive information. PII (Personally Identifiable Information), PHI (Protected Health Information), and other confidential data often end up in logs - often unintentionally. Storing raw, unmasked logs can lead to compliance violations (GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2), security risks, and data exposure if logs are misused.