What is the purpose of Amazon CloudTrail?

Amazon CloudTrail is designed to provide audit logs of AWS account activity. This service captures and records API calls made on your AWS account, which allows you to gain visibility into actions taken within your AWS environment. It logs details about these API calls, including the identity of the caller, the time of the call, the source IP address, the request parameters, and the response elements.

The audit logs generated by CloudTrail are essential for monitoring compliance, detecting unusual activity, and for security analysis. By analyzing these logs, administrators can track changes made to resources and configurations, helping to ensure that best practices and governance policies are being followed.

This capability is particularly important for organizations that require strong oversight of their cloud activities for security and regulatory compliance purposes. The logs can also be critical in forensics after a security incident, providing a clear trail of what occurred prior to and during the event.

In contrast, the other options focus on functionalities that do not pertain to CloudTrail. For example, allocating costs for AWS resources relates more to AWS Cost Explorer or AWS Budgets, while improving application performance touches on services like AWS CloudFront or AWS Elastic Load Balancing. Managing DNS records pertains to Amazon Route 53, which does not relate to logging