An AWS Network Monitoring Comparison

AWS recently released network traffic mirroring in their environment. As this is a relatively new feature, users of the service in the past have used tools such as Security Onion to monitor traffic using a hosted base model of forwarding network traffic to analyze the data. It may not be apparent to an organization which option works best for them, so an analysis should be done of both the traffic mirroring and host based options to determine the benefits and drawbacks of each method. This paper seeks to compare the two types of network monitoring available in the AWS environment, traffic mirroring and host based, and determine which method is more cost-effective, and, through testing, determine which method generates more alerts.