Amazon GuardDuty vs Tetragon
Amazon GuardDuty
aws.amazon.comTetragon
tetragon.ioSide by side
| Figure | Amazon GuardDuty | Tetragon |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 6 | 1 |
| Spec score · Cloud Workload Protection Platforms | 9.2 (#1) | 7.9 (#6) |
| Integrations | GuardDuty findings can be routed to AWS Security Hub, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Detective, or third-party solutions. | The official site documents Kubernetes installation via Helm and container deployment using an image from the Tetragon Quay repository. |
| Purpose | Amazon GuardDuty continuously monitors AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and generates detailed security findings. | Tetragon is a Kubernetes-aware security observability and runtime enforcement tool that applies policy and filtering with eBPF. |
Plans
Amazon GuardDuty
- 30-day free trialFree
- Amazon GuardDutyFree
- Malware Protection for EBS$0.03 a month
- Malware Protection for S3$0.09 a month
- Foundational threat detection — VPC Flow Logs and DNS query logs$1 a month
- Foundational threat detection — CloudTrail management events$4 a month
In their own words
Amazon GuardDuty
Amazon GuardDuty monitors AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and generates security findings for response. It analyzes CloudTrail, VPC Flow, DNS, S3, Aurora login, AWS Backup, AI workload, and runtime activity. Detection combines AI, machine learning, anomaly detection, and AWS and third-party threat intelligence. Runtime Monitoring covers EKS, ECS workloads including those on Fargate, and EC2 instances. GuardDuty can scan EC2-attached EBS volumes after suspicious activity and detect potentially harmful uploads to S3 buckets. AI Protection addresses threats such as unusual model invocations, cost harvesting, and prompt injection attempts in Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker workloads. Findings can go to AWS Security Hub, EventBridge, Amazon Detective, or third-party solutions. Foundational protections require no additional security software or infrastructure to deploy and maintain. The service is pay as you go: charges depend on analyzed data and vary by source and AWS Region. New accounts can receive a 30-day trial in supported Regions, and some features are unavailable in some Regions.
Tetragon
Tetragon is a Kubernetes-aware security observability and runtime enforcement tool for Linux, container, and Kubernetes workloads. It uses eBPF to monitor activity, filter events, and enforce policies in the kernel in real time. Process reports can include executed binaries, command-line arguments, user IDs, parent processes, and start times. Tetragon also monitors file access and changes, and can block unauthorized file operations at the kernel level. Kubernetes policies can filter activity by namespace, pod labels, and container fields, with support for containerd and CRI-O. Network visibility ties events to processes and workloads and tracks connections, socket lifecycle, and bytes sent or received. The tool also monitors credential changes, kernel module activity, and eBPF program loads and interactions. Findings are available as JSON logs or through gRPC. Installation options include Helm on Kubernetes, released Linux packages, and a container image. Tetragon is a Cilium sub-project and a CNCF project, and is available as an open-source project with no paid plans listed.