title: "Detection"
summary: "A layered method for designing, routing, validating, and troubleshooting security telemetry and detections across AWS environments."
Decision frame
Detection starts with the decision a responder must make, then works backward to the evidence, delivery path, permissions, retention, and owner. A service enabled without a response path is configuration, not a detection capability.
For every signal, trace: activity → source record → protected destination → normalization or finding → prioritization → routed notification → accountable responder → validation. At organization scale, include delegated administration, cross-account resource policies, KMS permissions, Regions, retry paths, dead-letter handling, and tamper resistance.
Work the objectives
- For 1.1, define monitored behaviors, affected accounts and Regions, severity, ownership, aggregation, routing, suppression, escalation, and measurable response.
- For 1.2, choose management, data, configuration, network, DNS, workload, edge, identity, and service-specific records from investigation needs. Protect integrity and access separately from workload administration.
- For 1.3, diagnose a missing alert layer by layer. Confirm the event occurred, collection was enabled in the right scope, delivery succeeded, the consumer parsed it, the rule matched, suppression did not hide it, and the notification target accepted it.
Common failure modes
Collecting everything without retention or query ownership creates cost, not assurance. A central log bucket does not help if a key policy blocks delivery. A Security Hub finding does not prove the underlying signal is complete. A notification success does not prove a human or automation owns the response.
Self-check
Given one suspicious API call, explain where its authoritative record originates, how it crosses account boundaries, what can block delivery, who receives the resulting alert, and how you would test the entire route without generating harmful activity.