An Amazon S3 bucket can be configured to create access log records for the requests made against it. An access log record contains details about the request such as the request type, the resource with which the request worked, and the time and date that the request was processed. Server access logs are useful for many applications, because they give bucket owners insight into the nature of requests made by clients not under their control.

By default, server access logs are not collected for a bucket. To learn how to enable server access logging, see Server Access Logging Configuration API.

Once logging is enabled for a bucket, available log records are periodically aggregated into log files and delivered to you via an Amazon S3 bucket of your choosing. For a detailed description of this process, see Delivery of Server Access Logs.

For information on how to interpret the contents of log files, see Server Access Log Format.

To walk through the process of enabling logging for your bucket, see Setting Up Server Access Logging.