Use Trusted Advisor to automatically identify cost savings, security risks, performance issues, and service limit warnings.
AWS Trusted Advisor — Your Cloud Advisor
Trusted Advisor automatically examines your AWS environment and provides recommendations across 5 categories: Cost Optimisation, Performance, Security, Fault Tolerance, and Service Limits.
Teacher Note: Think of Trusted Advisor as a consultant who reviews your entire AWS account and gives you a prioritised report card: red (critical issue), yellow (warning), green (good). It finds problems you might not notice.
Five Check Categories
| Category | Example Checks | Benefit |
|---|
| Cost Optimisation | Idle EC2 instances, unused Elastic IPs, underutilised Reserved Instances | Save money |
| Performance | High-utilisation EC2 instances, CloudFront config issues | Improve speed |
| Security | Open security groups (0.0.0.0/0), root account MFA missing, S3 bucket permissions | Reduce risk |
| Fault Tolerance | RDS not Multi-AZ, EC2 not across multiple AZs, no EBS snapshots | Improve reliability |
| Service Limits | Approaching EC2 instance limits, VPC limits, EIP limits | Prevent unexpected failures |
Support Plan Tiers for Trusted Advisor
| Plan | Checks Available | Cost |
|---|
| Basic/Developer | 7 core checks only (security and service limits) | Free |
| Business | All 400+ checks + CloudWatch integration | $100+/month |
| Enterprise | All checks + weekly reports + API access | $15,000+/month |
# Access Trusted Advisor via API (Business/Enterprise only)
aws support describe-trusted-advisor-checks --language en
aws support describe-trusted-advisor-check-summaries
--check-ids XXXXXXXX
# Refresh a specific check
aws support refresh-trusted-advisor-check --check-id XXXXXXXX
Exam Tip: Trusted Advisor is one of the first tools to check on a new AWS account. The 7 free security checks alone (exposed access keys, open security groups, S3 public buckets, root MFA, IAM use) are extremely valuable for maintaining basic security hygiene.