Amazon Detective helps you investigate and get to the root cause of security findings. It automatically builds a linked view of your resources, activity, and GuardDuty findings so you can analyze suspicious behavior.

Detective vs GuardDuty

GuardDuty detects a threat and raises a finding. Detective helps you investigate that finding — visualizing the activity timeline and relationships to determine what happened. Detection = GuardDuty; deep investigation/root cause = Detective.

Test yourself

Practice question

After GuardDuty raises an alert, a security analyst needs to investigate the root cause by visualizing the related activity and resource behavior over time. Which service?

  1. Amazon Inspector
  2. Amazon Detective
  3. AWS Config
  4. Amazon Macie
👉 Click to reveal the answer & explanation

Correct answer: B. Detective is purpose-built to investigate and find the root cause of security findings by correlating activity and GuardDuty alerts. Inspector (A) scans for vulnerabilities; Config (C) tracks configuration; Macie (D) discovers sensitive data.

Related topics

Amazon GuardDuty · Amazon Inspector · AWS CloudTrail

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