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If you are wondering what kind of request is coming to your bucket and what you pay money for you may consider turning on Amazon S3 logging to record the requests coming to your bucket. This is a simple task that MSP360 Explorer freeware will make it even easier.

A Bucket to Keep Log Files

Let’s create a bucket called cloudberry.log to keep your log file. You don’t necessarily have to create a new bucket for your log files, but I think it is a good idea to have a separate bucket for the purpose to make things better organized.

Configure Logging

Let’s imagine we want to configure logging for a bucket called cb_test. So, all you have to do is to select the bucket and to click the Logging button on the toolbar.

Now check the “Use logging” checkbox and choose the bucket where you want the log files to be written in the dropdown list. In our example it is cloudberry.log.

Click ok and you are done. According to Amazon documentation, the log file doesn’t appear immediately. It may take up to 24 hours for the log file to be created.

What's Next?

Now you are asking yourself: what can I do with the log files, how I can view them? What format are they stored in? Read our second blog post in this series on analyzing the log files.

Final Notes

A log file can be written to the bucket in the same geographical location. In other words, if you are logging the access to the bucket in the US you will have to assign another bucket in the US to keep that log.

Also, notice that logfile will add up to your monthly bill (although insignificantly) as you will need some additional S3 storage for your log files. The number of log files will grow over time so don’t forget to clean them up regularly.

S3 Log Accuracy

One thing worth mentioning that even though Amazon will make the best effort to make the log as accurate as possible it doesn't guarantee its complete accuracy. In a rare situation, certain requests will not make it to the log. But as Amazon explains S3 log is designed to give a general idea of how your bucket is being used.

We are extending MSP360 S3 Explorer with useful Amazon S3 functionality and in the post, we would like to introduce the Canned ACL policy support. When doing a PUT request you can specify a canned ACL, which grants certain access rights. You don’t need to do an extra request to set an ACL. This makes working with Amazon S3 more efficient. In the previous releases of MSP360, S3 Explorer we ran an extra request for setting ACL of every type. Now we will recognize the type of ACL you want to set and run canned ACL whenever appropriate.

Following are canned ACLs that are supported for REST.

·private—Owner gets.FULL_CONTROL

No one else has access rights (default).

·public-read—Owner gets FULL_CONTROL and the anonymous principal is granted READ access.

If this policy is used on an object, it can be read from a browser with no authentication.

·public-read-write—Owner gets FULL_CONTROL, the anonymous principal is granted READ and WRITE access.

This can be a useful policy to apply to a bucket but is generally not recommended.

·authenticated-read—Owner gets FULL_CONTROL, and any principal authenticated as a registered Amazon S3 user is granted READ access.

·bucket-owner-read—Object Owner gets FULL_CONTROL, Bucket Owner gets READ

This ACL applies only to objects and is equivalent to private when used with PUT Bucket. You use this ACL to let someone other than the bucket owner write content (get full control) in the bucket but still grant the bucket owner read access to the objects.

·bucket-owner-full-control—Object Owner gets FULL_CONTROL, Bucket Owner gets FULL_CONTROL

This ACL applies only to objects and is equivalent to private when used with PUT Bucket. You use this ACL to let someone other than the bucket owner write content (get full control) in the bucket but still grant the bucket owner full rights over the objects.

Note: this post applies to MSP360 Explorer 1.9 and later.

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