CloudTrail - seanremenyi/Notes_aws_developer GitHub Wiki

records user activity in your AWS account CloudTrail records events related to creation, modification or deletion of resources( such as iam users, s3 buckets and ec2 instance) by default you can view the last 90 days of activity

Cloud watch is about

performance and metrics cloudwatch logs (for error messages and warnings) cloudwatch alarms Cloudtrail record api calls for your aws account delivers log files conating API calls to an s3 bucket Can be integrated with CloudWAtch logs. Understand the difference do you need to monitor the performance and health of your resources (cloudwatch) do you need an audit log of user activity in you aws account (cloudtrail)