Amazon GuardDuty
Cloud security monitoring and analytics software
Cloud security software
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What is Amazon GuardDuty
Amazon GuardDuty is a managed threat detection service for AWS environments that analyzes AWS data sources to identify suspicious activity and potential compromise. It is used by cloud security and operations teams to monitor AWS accounts, workloads, and data access patterns and to triage findings. GuardDuty integrates with AWS-native services for alerting, automation, and centralized security operations across multiple accounts. It is designed for continuous monitoring with minimal infrastructure management by the customer.
AWS-native telemetry coverage
GuardDuty consumes AWS-native signals such as CloudTrail events, VPC Flow Logs, and DNS logs to detect suspicious behavior without requiring customers to deploy and manage sensors. This makes it practical for organizations that standardize on AWS accounts and want consistent baseline monitoring. It also supports multi-account monitoring through AWS Organizations to centralize visibility. The approach reduces operational overhead compared with self-managed log pipelines.
Managed detections and findings
GuardDuty provides curated finding types and severity scoring to help teams prioritize investigation. Findings include context such as affected resources, observed indicators, and recommended remediation guidance. The service is continuously updated by AWS, which reduces the need for customers to maintain detection content. This is useful for teams that want a managed detection layer rather than building rules from scratch.
Strong AWS service integrations
GuardDuty integrates with AWS services commonly used for security operations, including Security Hub, EventBridge, and AWS Lambda for alert routing and automated response. It also supports exporting findings to external systems via APIs and event streams. These integrations help teams connect detections to ticketing, SOAR-style workflows, and centralized dashboards. The result is faster operationalization within an AWS-centric toolchain.
Primarily AWS-focused scope
GuardDuty is designed for AWS telemetry and does not provide equivalent native coverage for non-AWS clouds or on-prem environments. Organizations operating across multiple cloud providers typically need additional tools to achieve consistent cross-environment monitoring. This can lead to fragmented detection and reporting across platforms. It is best suited when AWS is the primary runtime environment.
Not a full SIEM platform
GuardDuty produces security findings but does not replace a full log analytics or SIEM system for broad ingestion, long-term retention, and complex correlation across diverse data sources. Teams often still require separate tooling for centralized search, compliance reporting, and custom analytics. Investigation workflows may depend on exporting findings and correlating them with other logs. This adds integration and operational design work.
Tuning and cost management needed
As with many managed detection services, organizations may need to tune alerting and suppression to reduce noise for their environment. Costs can vary based on enabled data sources and account scale, requiring ongoing monitoring and budgeting. Multi-account deployments also require governance to ensure consistent configuration. Without operational ownership, findings can accumulate without timely triage.
Plan & Pricing
Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go Free tier/trial: 30-day free trial per AWS account per Region for GuardDuty; Malware Protection for Amazon S3 uses the AWS Free Tier (12-month free tier eligibility for new/eligible accounts) and Malware Protection for EC2 GuardDuty-initiated scans is included in the 30-day trial.
Example costs (US East - N. Virginia examples shown on official pricing page):
- CloudTrail management event analysis: $4.00 per 1 million events (priced per million, prorated).
- CloudTrail S3 data event analysis: $0.80 per 1 million events (first 500M), $0.40 per 1 million events (next 500M) — volume discounts apply.
- VPC Flow Logs and DNS query log analysis: tiered per-GB pricing (example tiers shown): 1) first 500 GB at $1.00/GB; 2) next 2,000 GB at $0.50/GB; 3) next 500 GB at $0.25/GB (volume discounts apply).
- Amazon EKS (audit logs) events: example tiers — $1.60 per 1 million events (first 100M), $0.80 per 1 million events (next 100M).
- Runtime Monitoring (EKS/EC2/ECS workloads): charged per vCPU per month with tiered pricing in examples: $1.50 per vCPU (first 500 vCPUs), $0.75 per vCPU (next 4,500 vCPUs).
- Malware Protection (EBS/EBS snapshot scans): example shown $0.03 per GB scanned (EBS data scanned).
- Malware Protection for S3: two dimensions — data scanned (example reduced price $0.09 per GB scanned in US East after Feb 1, 2025) and objects evaluated (example $0.215 per 1,000 objects evaluated).
- RDS Protection: $1.00 per vCPU per month (example in US East); Aurora Serverless v2 charged per ACU (example $0.25 per ACU per month for the example shown).
Discounts & notes:
- Pricing varies by data source and AWS Region and is subject to change; many data-source charges are volume-discounted.
- AWS provides the AWS Pricing Calculator for GuardDuty and region-specific pricing tables on the official pricing page.
- GuardDuty provides per-account, per-region 30-day free trials for GuardDuty and for individual protection plans that have not been previously enabled.
Source: Official Amazon GuardDuty pricing and GuardDuty documentation (AWS).
Seller details
Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Seattle, Washington, USA
2006
Subsidiary
https://aws.amazon.com/
https://x.com/awscloud
https://www.linkedin.com/company/amazon-web-services/
