AWS Trusted Advisor is a powerful service that provides real-time guidance to help optimize your AWS infrastructure, improve security and performance, reduce costs, and monitor service limits. It acts as an automated cloud consultant that analyzes your AWS environment against best practices across …AWS Trusted Advisor is a powerful service that provides real-time guidance to help optimize your AWS infrastructure, improve security and performance, reduce costs, and monitor service limits. It acts as an automated cloud consultant that analyzes your AWS environment against best practices across five key categories.
**Cost Optimization**: Trusted Advisor identifies unused or idle resources, such as unattached EBS volumes, idle load balancers, and underutilized EC2 instances, helping organizations reduce unnecessary spending.
**Performance**: It evaluates your infrastructure for performance improvements, including high-utilization EC2 instances, CloudFront configuration optimizations, and service limits that might impact application performance.
**Security**: This category checks for security vulnerabilities like open access permissions on S3 buckets, security groups with unrestricted access, IAM usage patterns, MFA on root accounts, and exposed access keys.
**Fault Tolerance**: Trusted Advisor assesses your architecture for high availability by checking Auto Scaling configurations, Multi-AZ deployments for RDS, ELB health checks, and backup configurations.
**Service Limits**: It monitors your usage against AWS service limits and alerts you when approaching thresholds, preventing service disruptions.
**Access Tiers**: Basic and Developer support plans receive access to core security checks and service limit checks. Business and Enterprise support plans unlock the full suite of checks across all categories.
**Integration Capabilities**: Trusted Advisor integrates with Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring check status changes, AWS Organizations for aggregated views across multiple accounts, and can trigger automated remediation through Lambda functions using EventBridge.
**Organizational Use**: For complex multi-account environments, Trusted Advisor can be accessed via AWS Organizations to provide consolidated recommendations, enabling centralized governance and compliance monitoring across the enterprise. This makes it invaluable for Solutions Architects managing large-scale deployments requiring consistent security and operational standards.
AWS Trusted Advisor - Complete Guide for AWS Solutions Architect Professional Exam
What is AWS Trusted Advisor?
AWS Trusted Advisor is an online resource that helps you reduce cost, increase performance, and improve security by optimizing your AWS environment. It acts as your customized cloud expert, analyzing your AWS infrastructure and providing real-time recommendations across five categories.
5. Service Limits - Monitors usage against service quotas - Alerts when approaching limits - Helps prevent service disruptions
Why is AWS Trusted Advisor Important?
- Proactive Management: Identifies issues before they impact operations - Cost Savings: Organizations typically save 10-30% on AWS costs - Security Enhancement: Continuous security posture assessment - Operational Excellence: Aligns with AWS Well-Architected Framework - Compliance Support: Helps maintain security best practices
How AWS Trusted Advisor Works:
1. Automatic Scanning: Trusted Advisor continuously scans your AWS environment against best practice checks
2. Check Categories: Each check falls into one of the five pillars and has a status indicator (green, yellow, or red)
3. Recommendations: Provides specific, actionable recommendations with estimated savings or impact
4. Integration: Works with CloudWatch for automated responses and notifications via SNS
Support Plan Considerations:
Basic and Developer Support: - Access to 7 core checks only - Service Limits checks - Basic Security checks (S3 bucket permissions, Security Groups, IAM use, MFA on root)
Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise Support: - Full access to all Trusted Advisor checks - API access for programmatic retrieval - CloudWatch integration - Weekly notification emails
Automation and Integration:
- Trusted Advisor API: Programmatic access to check results - CloudWatch Events: Trigger Lambda functions based on check status changes - AWS Organizations: View Trusted Advisor data across all accounts - Service Quotas: Integrates for service limit management
Exam Tips: Answering Questions on AWS Trusted Advisor
Tip 1: Know the Support Plan Requirements When a question mentions needing full Trusted Advisor checks, remember that Business or Enterprise support is required. Basic support only provides limited checks.
Tip 2: Understand Use Cases - Cost optimization scenarios often involve Trusted Advisor - Security audit requirements frequently reference Trusted Advisor checks - Service limit concerns should trigger thoughts about Trusted Advisor
Tip 3: Differentiate from Similar Services - AWS Config: Resource configuration tracking and compliance - AWS Inspector: Vulnerability assessment for EC2 and containers - AWS Security Hub: Aggregates security findings from multiple services - Trusted Advisor: Best practice recommendations across all five pillars
Tip 4: Remember Organizational Complexity Context For multi-account scenarios, remember that AWS Organizations allows viewing Trusted Advisor recommendations across member accounts from the management account.
Tip 5: Automation Scenarios When questions ask about automating responses to Trusted Advisor findings, think about CloudWatch Events triggering Lambda functions or SNS notifications.
Tip 6: Cost Optimization Questions If a question asks about identifying underutilized resources or cost savings opportunities, Trusted Advisor is often the correct answer for broad recommendations.
Tip 7: Service Limits Questions about monitoring service quotas and preventing limit-related failures should consider Trusted Advisor alongside Service Quotas service.
Common Exam Scenarios:
- A company needs to audit security configurations across multiple accounts - Think Trusted Advisor with AWS Organizations - An organization wants automated cost optimization recommendations - Think Trusted Advisor Cost Optimization checks - A team needs to ensure they do not exceed service limits - Think Trusted Advisor Service Limits checks - A security team wants to identify overly permissive security groups - Think Trusted Advisor Security checks