What is the purpose of AWS CloudTrail?

AWS CloudTrail is primarily designed to enable governance, compliance, and operational risk auditing within your AWS environment. It achieves this by automatically logging and monitoring account activity across your AWS infrastructure. These logs include details about actions taken on resources and the identity of the user or service that made those actions. Such visibility is critical for organizations to maintain security, adhere to compliance requirements, and conduct audits.

The information captured by CloudTrail can be invaluable for understanding user activity, identifying potential security incidents, and ensuring that all actions taken in the AWS account are in line with the organization’s policies. By analyzing these logs, organizations can enhance their operational efficiencies, mitigate risks associated with data loss or breaches, and demonstrate compliance with regulatory standards.

Other options do not align with the primary functionality of CloudTrail. For instance, data backup and recovery falls under services like AWS Backup or Amazon S3, while managing network settings is typically handled by services such as AWS VPC or AWS Direct Connect. Machine learning applications are managed through services like Amazon SageMaker. Thus, the focus of CloudTrail on logging and monitoring user activity distinctly supports governance and compliance efforts.