Lab
A Cloud Guru

Sending VPC Flow Logs to S3 and Parsing the Logs via Amazon Athena

During this hands-on project you will explore using Amazon Athena, Amazon S3, and VPC Flow Logs to deploy an easily searchable analytics platform using SQL-like queries.

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Path Info

Level

Intermediate

Duration

45m

Published

Feb 12, 2024

Challenge

Create the VPC Flow Log and Generate Records
- Create a brand new VPC Flow Log for the entire VPC.
- Name the flow logs vpc-to-s3
- Set the filter to All
- Set a 1 minute aggregation interval
- Configure the flow log to be sent to your new Amazon S3 bucket
- Use the AWS default format
- Use the Parquet log file format
- Enable Hive-compatible S3 prefixes
- Partition logs by every 1 hour
- Browse to the DNS entry for OurApplicationLoadBalancer using HTTP and refresh a couple of times to generate traffic
- Wait a few minutes and refresh the S3 objects list until you start seeing objects generated before you move on
Challenge

Set up Amazon Athena
- Change your Athena settings to save query results to your new Amazon S3 bucket and append /queries/ to the end of the bucket name (Example: _s3://csaa-hol-213432inh32i4/queries/)
- Create a new database called vpc_flow_logs_db within the AwsDataCatalog data source. SQL Query - Create Database
- Within the new database, create a new table called vpc_flow_logs. SQL Query - Create Table
- After successful, update and repartition the table using MSCK. SQL Query - Repair Table and Update Partitions
- Run a SQL query of your choosing!
- If you receive a DDL error when attempting to run the MSCK command, execute the Fixing Errors steps and restart the Athena process.
Challenge

Create the Amazon S3 Bucket
- Create a new S3 bucket that is prefixed with csaa-hol-

Author

A Cloud Guru

The Cloud Content team comprises subject matter experts hyper focused on services offered by the leading cloud vendors (AWS, GCP, and Azure), as well as cloud-related technologies such as Linux and DevOps. The team is thrilled to share their knowledge to help you build modern tech solutions from the ground up, secure and optimize your environments, and so much more!

What's a lab?

Hands-on Labs are real environments created by industry experts to help you learn. These environments help you gain knowledge and experience, practice without compromising your system, test without risk, destroy without fear, and let you learn from your mistakes. Hands-on Labs: practice your skills before delivering in the real world.