Database Audit for Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena lets you run SQL queries directly on data in Amazon S3—no servers to manage. That simplicity, however, means more users accessing more data from more locations. This is where auditing becomes critical.

A data audit for Amazon Athena helps detect risky access to sensitive data, control costs, and stay compliant with GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.

AWS provides the basics. But if you want deeper insights—like usage trends, cost drivers, and possible abuse—you’ll need more. Let’s explore both AWS native tools and how DataSunrise can enhance your setup. See AWS logging docs.

Native Athena Auditing with AWS Tools

AWS gives you the building blocks: CloudTrail captures Athena queries, and CloudWatch Events triggers actions. Lambda functions fetch details using the Athena API and forward logs to Kinesis Data Firehose. These logs are stored in Amazon S3, cataloged with AWS Glue, and made available to Athena and QuickSight for analysis.

You can track query metrics, IAM users, and source IPs by listening to StartQueryExecution events. This helps correlate queries with user actions and highlight things like:

• Expensive or repetitive queries
• Unusual activity patterns
• Top users or workgroups by cost

While powerful, this approach is complex. You need to manage Lambda functions, Glue crawlers, and QuickSight dashboards yourself. There’s no built-in alerting or policy enforcement. Here’s a full AWS blog on setup.

Athena Auditing Made Simple with DataSunrise

DataSunrise simplifies auditing. Acting as a reverse proxy, it logs all activity and adds security rules and dashboards on top.

Quick Setup

Connect your Athena instance by providing your AWS region, credentials, and S3 bucket path. From there, define audit rules based on roles, schemas, or SQL patterns. You can even use Learning Rules to generate rules from live activity.

Logs can be sent to local storage or external platforms like Elasticsearch. With proper audit storage configuration, you’ll also get real-time alerts and automated report generation.

More Than Logging: Enforcing Policies and Protecting Data

With DataSunrise, you can redact sensitive data using dynamic masking, limit access with RBAC, and automate compliance reports via the Compliance Manager.

This is especially useful for organizations handling personal or financial data.

You also get full Database Activity Monitoring, built-in threat detection, and advanced data-inspired security features.

Summary

Auditing Athena is more than a technical task—it’s essential for security and compliance. AWS provides the foundation, but DataSunrise gives you advanced features like masking, reporting, and real-time alerts.

If your Athena queries touch sensitive data, or if you just want cleaner visibility into who’s doing what, consider trying the DataSunrise demo.

Also check out our audit goals guide to start shaping your audit strategy.