Amazon Detective is specifically designed to help security teams investigate and visualize the root cause of security findings. According to AWS Certified Security – Specialty documentation, Detective automatically aggregates and correlates data from GuardDuty, CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs to provide interactive visualizations and timelines.
Detective enables investigators to pivot from GuardDuty findings to IAM roles, API calls, network traffic, and resource behavior. This makes it the most efficient tool for understanding how IAM roles were used during suspicious activity.
Amazon Inspector focuses on vulnerability assessment, not behavioral investigation. Security Hub aggregates findings but does not provide deep investigation graphs. Manual analysis with Athena requires significantly more effort.
AWS guidance explicitly recommends Amazon Detective for root cause analysis and visualization of security incidents.
Referenced AWS Specialty Documents:
AWS Certified Security – Specialty Official Study Guide
Amazon Detective Investigation Capabilities
AWS Threat Detection and Analysis
