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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
Clock icon Intermediate
Duration
Clock icon 45m
Last updated
Clock icon Sep 02, 2025

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Table of Contents

  1. 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

  2. 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.

  3. Challenge

    Create the Amazon S3 Bucket

    • Create a new S3 bucket that is prefixed with csaa-hol-
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