AWS Audit Manager is no longer open to new customers. Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal. For more information, see AWS Audit Manager availability change.

AWS API calls supported by AWS Audit Manager

You can use Audit Manager to capture snapshots of your AWS environment as evidence for audits. When you create or edit a custom control, you can specify one or more AWS API calls as a data source mapping for evidence collection. Audit Manager then makes API calls to the relevant AWS services, and collects a snapshot of the configuration details for your AWS resources.

For every resource that's in the scope of an API call, Audit Manager captures a configuration snapshot and converts it into evidence. This results in one piece of evidence per resource, as opposed to one piece of evidence per API call.

For example, if the ec2_DescribeRouteTables API call captures configuration snapshots from five route tables, then you'll get five pieces of evidence in total for the single API call. Each piece of evidence is a snapshot of the configuration of an individual route table.

Key points

Paginated API calls

Many AWS services collect and store a large amount of data. As a result, when a list, describe, or get API call attempts to return your data, there can be a lot of results. If the amount of data is too large to return in a single response, the results can be broken into more manageable pieces through the use of pagination. This divides the results into "pages" of data, making the responses easier to handle.

Some of the Supported API calls for custom control data sources are paginated. This means that they return partial results at first, and require subsequent requests to return the entire result set. For example, the Amazon RDS DescribeDBInstances operation returns up to 100 instances at a time, and subsequent requests are needed to return the next page of results.

As of March 08, 2023, Audit Manager supports paginated API calls as a data source for evidence collection. Previously, if a paginated API call was used as a data source, only a subset of your resources was returned in the API response (up to 100 results). Now, Audit Manager calls the paginated API operation multiple times, and gets each page of results until all resources are returned. For each resource, Audit Manager then captures a configuration snapshot and saves it as evidence. Because your complete set of resources is now captured in the API response, it’s likely that you’ll notice an increase in the amount of evidence that’s collected after March 08, 2023.

Audit Manager handles API call pagination for you automatically. If you create a custom control that uses a paginated API call as a data source, you don’t need to specify any pagination parameters.

Supported API calls for custom control data sources

In your custom controls, you can use any of the following API calls as a data source. Audit Manager can then use these API calls to collect evidence about your AWS usage.