7 questions foundWhat is AWS Trusted Advisor and what categories of recommendations does it provide?
Beginner AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that automatically inspects your AWS environment and provides real time recommendations across five categories, including cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits, helping you identify opportunities to save money, improve system performance, close security gaps, and improve the resilience of your architecture, all based on established AWS best practices.
aws support describe-trusted-advisor-checks --language en
Real-world example A company running its account for the first time reviews Trusted Advisor's recommendations and immediately discovers several unattached EBS volumes accumulating unnecessary charges, along with a security group allowing unrestricted access that needed correction.
Common follow-ups: What is the difference between the checks available in the free tier versus with a paid support plan?;How often does Trusted Advisor refresh its recommendations?
AWS Cost Management & Billing;AWS Security Hub & GuardDuty
What level of AWS Support plan is required to access the full set of Trusted Advisor checks?
Beginner While a limited set of core Trusted Advisor checks, primarily around security and service limits, are available to every AWS account for free, accessing the full comprehensive set of checks across all five categories, including detailed cost optimization and performance recommendations, requires a Business, Enterprise On Ramp, or Enterprise level AWS Support plan.
aws support describe-severity-levels
Real-world example A growing company upgrades from a Basic support plan to a Business support plan specifically to unlock the full range of Trusted Advisor cost optimization checks, quickly identifying several opportunities to reduce their monthly AWS spending.
Common follow-ups: What specific checks are included in the free tier versus the paid tiers?;How does the cost of a Business support plan compare to the potential savings identified by Trusted Advisor?
AWS Cost Management & Billing;AWS Organizations & Multi Account Strategy
How do Trusted Advisor's cost optimization checks help identify wasted spending across an AWS account?
Intermediate Trusted Advisor's cost optimization checks analyze your actual resource usage patterns to identify opportunities such as idle or underutilized EC2 instances that could be downsized or terminated, unattached EBS volumes still incurring storage charges, idle load balancers with no active traffic, and opportunities to purchase Reserved Instances or Savings Plans based on your consistent usage patterns, surfacing concrete, actionable recommendations rather than requiring you to manually dig through usage reports yourself.
aws support describe-trusted-advisor-check-result --check-id abc123 --language en
Real-world example A finance team reviews Trusted Advisor's low utilization EC2 instance check and discovers several oversized instances running well below ten percent CPU utilization, downsizing them and immediately reducing their monthly compute costs by a meaningful amount.
Common follow-ups: How does Trusted Advisor determine that an instance is underutilized?;How often should these cost optimization checks be reviewed as part of a regular process?
EC2 & Compute;AWS Cost Management & Billing
How do Trusted Advisor's security checks help identify common misconfigurations before they become serious security incidents?
Intermediate Trusted Advisor's security checks scan for common security misconfigurations such as overly permissive security groups allowing unrestricted access to sensitive ports, S3 buckets with public access enabled unintentionally, IAM accounts lacking multi factor authentication, and root account usage, surfacing these issues clearly so they can be corrected proactively before they are discovered and exploited by an actual attacker.
aws support describe-trusted-advisor-check-result --check-id security-check-id --language en
Real-world example A security review using Trusted Advisor reveals that several IAM users still lack multi factor authentication enabled, prompting the security team to immediately enforce MFA across all accounts before this gap could be exploited by a compromised password.
Common follow-ups: How does Trusted Advisor's security scanning compare to a dedicated service like GuardDuty?;Can Trusted Advisor security findings be automatically remediated?
AWS Security Hub & GuardDuty;IAM
How can Trusted Advisor's service limit checks help prevent unexpected application failures due to hitting an AWS account resource limit?
Intermediate Trusted Advisor monitors your usage against many default AWS service limits, such as the maximum number of EC2 instances or VPCs allowed per region, alerting you when your usage is approaching a limit that could otherwise cause new resource creation to unexpectedly fail during a critical moment, such as during an urgent scaling event, giving you time to proactively request a limit increase from AWS before it becomes an actual production problem.
aws service-quotas get-service-quota --service-code ec2 --quota-code L-1216C47A
Real-world example An operations team receives an early Trusted Advisor warning that their account is approaching its default VPC limit well before a planned expansion project, allowing them to request an increased limit from AWS support with plenty of lead time before it would have blocked their deployment.
Common follow-ups: How do you request a service limit increase once Trusted Advisor flags an approaching limit?;Which service limits does Trusted Advisor monitor by default?
AWS Organizations & Multi Account Strategy;Auto Scaling Groups
How can Trusted Advisor recommendations be aggregated and monitored programmatically across an entire AWS Organization using the Trusted Advisor API?
Advanced The AWS Support API lets you programmatically retrieve Trusted Advisor check results, which can be combined with AWS Organizations to build automated reporting that aggregates recommendations across every member account into a centralized dashboard, and this same API can trigger automated workflows, such as sending a weekly summary report to relevant stakeholders or automatically creating tickets for critical security findings that need immediate attention.
aws support describe-trusted-advisor-checks --language en --query 'checks[?category==`security`]'
Real-world example A large enterprise builds a custom Lambda function that queries Trusted Advisor results across all fifty of its AWS accounts weekly, automatically compiling a consolidated report highlighting the highest priority cost and security findings for leadership review.
Common follow-ups: What permissions are needed to programmatically access Trusted Advisor data across an entire organization?;How often should automated Trusted Advisor reporting run to stay useful without becoming noise?
AWS Organizations & Multi Account Strategy;AWS Cost Management & Billing
How should an organization integrate Trusted Advisor recommendations into an ongoing operational governance process rather than treating it as a one time review?
Advanced An effective governance process establishes a regular cadence, such as monthly, for reviewing Trusted Advisor findings across cost, security, performance, and fault tolerance categories, assigns clear ownership for addressing findings within specific teams, tracks remediation progress over time to measure improvement, and where appropriate, automates responses to well understood, low risk findings, ensuring Trusted Advisor becomes an ongoing part of operational hygiene rather than a report that is generated once and then forgotten.
aws support describe-trusted-advisor-check-summaries --check-ids abc123 def456
Real-world example An organization establishes a monthly Trusted Advisor review meeting where each identified finding is assigned to a specific team with a tracked remediation deadline, resulting in a steadily improving security and cost posture measured quarter over quarter rather than sporadic, one off cleanup efforts.
Common follow-ups: How do you measure whether a Trusted Advisor governance process is actually improving outcomes over time?;What is a reasonable balance between full automation and manual review for addressing findings?
AWS Config;AWS Cost Management & Billing