This article examines AWS Network Firewall logging strategies, comparing three architectural patterns for log management with cost-benefit analysis.

• Network Firewall provides alert logs (stateful inspection details) and flow logs (traffic trends)
• Stateless rules don't support logging; configure stateless defaults to forward to stateful rules
• Amazon S3 with Athena/QuickSight: most economical (~$3,800/month for 15TB baseline)
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs: 1.8x baseline cost (~$6,900/month) with real-time dashboards
• Kinesis Data Firehose with OpenSearch: 2.7x+ baseline cost (~$10,100/month) for rapid threat response
• Use strict rule evaluation order to log allowed traffic with alert rules before pass rules
• S3 Intelligent-Tiering and Lifecycle policies reduce long-term storage costs
• CloudWatch logs can be exported to S3 via Lambda/EventBridge for compliance retention

Choose logging patterns based on security requirements, compliance needs, and incident response speed rather than cost alone. Organizations can use different solutions for flow versus alert logs.