AWS Trusted Advisor
- What it is
- Automated best-practice inspector that scans your account and gives prioritized recommendations.
- Five check categories
- Cost Optimization — idle load balancers, underutilized EC2 instances, unassociated Elastic IPs.
- Performance — over-utilized instances, low EBS throughput.
- Security — S3 buckets open to the public, MFA not enabled on root, security groups with unrestricted ports.
- Fault Tolerance — no Multi-AZ, no backups, no Auto Scaling.
- Service Limits (Quotas) — usage above 80% of a limit.
- Access depends on the AWS Support plan
- Basic and Developer: a small set of core security and service-limit checks.
- Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise: the full check set, plus API access and Amazon EventBridge notifications.
- Not to be confused with
- AWS Config — you write custom rules; Trusted Advisor is a fixed AWS-authored list.
- AWS Compute Optimizer — deeper, ML-driven right-sizing recommendations for compute specifically.