6 Practice Tests – AWS Certified Architect Professional

Based on the scenario provided and the need for a centralized logging and monitoring solution for a multi-account AWS environment, the combination of the following AWS services would be most suitable:

1. AWS CloudTrail: It provides a history of AWS API calls for your account, which is essential for security analysis and meeting compliance requirements. CloudTrail captures detailed user-level activity involving AWS service APIs in near real-time.
2. Amazon CloudWatch Logs: This service can collect and track logs from applications, system components (like operating systems or infrastructure software), and AWS services. It makes it easy to visualize and analyze log data in near real-time with no need to configure or manage any servers.
3. AWS KMS (or equivalent industry standard key management solution): While not explicitly mentioned in the original answers, AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is crucial for encrypting sensitive log data at rest before it’s sent to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or Amazon OpenSearch Service. This ensures that your log data remains secure and compliant with all relevant data protection regulations.
4. Amazon OpenSearch Service (formerly Elasticsearch Service): As a fully managed service, it offers real-time full-text search, anomaly detection, and data visualization capabilities. This service provides fast, scalable search capabilities over the logs collected by CloudWatch Logs or generated by AWS services like CloudTrail.
5. AWS Lambda (optional): For automating data processing in near real-time as new log entries are ingested into Amazon OpenSearch Service. You can set up Lambda functions to query, transform, and load log data for more advanced analytics or additional aggregation.
6. AWS Glue/Amazon Athena (optional): For serverless data preparation and analysis. AWS Glue can help by categorizing the log data into tables for querying using Amazon Athena or other Big Data tools. This allows for complex queries on log data to extract operational insights.
7. AWS CloudFormation or Terraform (optional): For infrastructure as code to define and provision the AWS resources managed by your logging and monitoring solution, ensuring consistent and repeatable setups across accounts.
8. Amazon S3 (optional): For storing logs from services that do not natively support integration with CloudWatch Logs, or for maintaining an additional copy of logs for extended retention periods.

These services provide a robust and scalable centralized logging and monitoring solution that can handle real-time analysis, comply with data retention policies, and offer cost-effective management and deployment.