Trusted Advisor

AWS Trusted Advisor

Trusted Advisor Categories
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 2 Comments

AWS Trusted Advisor

  • Trusted Advisor continuously evaluates the AWS environment using best practice checks and provides recommendations for cloud cost optimization, performance, resilience, security, operational excellence, and service limits.
  • Trusted Advisor checks the following six categories
    • Cost Optimization
      • Recommendations that can potentially save money by highlighting unused resources and opportunities to reduce the bill.
      • Integrates with AWS Cost Optimization Hub (since May 2025) for more accurate, personalized cost savings recommendations that account for specific commercial terms (RIs, Savings Plans).
    • Security
      • Identification of security settings and gaps, inline with best practices, that could make the AWS solution less secure.
      • Integrates with AWS Security Hub CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) controls for comprehensive security findings.
    • Resilience (previously known as Fault Tolerance)
      • Recommendations that help increase the resiliency and availability of the AWS solution by highlighting redundancy shortfalls, current service limits, and over-utilized resources.
      • Integrates with AWS Resilience Hub for application resiliency assessments.
    • Performance
      • Recommendations that can help improve the speed and responsiveness of applications.
      • Includes checks from AWS Compute Optimizer for right-sizing recommendations.
    • Operational Excellence (Added Oct 2023)
      • Checks that help apply AWS best practices to operate the AWS environment effectively and at scale.
      • Supports the AWS Well-Architected Framework Review, accelerating alignment with best practices.
      • Powered by AWS Config managed rules for continuous evaluation.
    • Service Limits
      • Checks for service usage that is more than 80% of the service limit.
      • Values are based on a snapshot, so the current usage might differ.
      • Limit and usage data can take up to 24 hours to reflect any changes.
  • Trusted Advisor currently offers 482 total checks across 56 AWS services.
    • 56 checks are available to all AWS account plans (Basic and above).
    • 482 checks (full set) are available with Business Support+ and above.

Trusted Advisor Categories

AWS Support Plan Access

⚠️ AWS Support Plan Restructuring (Effective Jan 1, 2027)

AWS has announced a simplified support portfolio (Dec 2025). The following plans are being discontinued on January 1, 2027:

  • Developer Support — Discontinued Jan 1, 2027
  • Business Support — Discontinued Jan 1, 2027
  • Enterprise On-Ramp — Customers auto-upgraded to Enterprise Support throughout 2026

New support plans: Basic, Business Support+, Enterprise Support, and Unified Operations.

  • AWS Basic support plan provides access to:
    • All checks in the Service Limits category
    • Selected checks in the Security and Resilience (Fault Tolerance) categories
    • Manual refresh only (no automatic check updates)
  • AWS Business Support+ (replacing Developer and Business plans) includes:
    • Full set of 482 checks across all categories
    • AWS Support API provides programmatic access to manage Support cases and Trusted Advisor check requests
    • Automatic weekly refresh of checks
    • Amazon EventBridge integration for automated monitoring and remediation
    • Starts at $29/month minimum per account
  • AWS Enterprise Support and Unified Operations plans additionally include:
    • Trusted Advisor Priority — provides prioritized and context-driven recommendations from your AWS account team as well as machine-generated checks
    • Enterprise Support minimum reduced from $15,000 to $5,000
    • Unified Operations offers 5-minute response times for mission-critical workloads

Trusted Advisor Key Features

AWS Config Integration

  • Trusted Advisor integrates with AWS Config managed rules to deliver best practice checks.
  • 64 checks powered by AWS Config were added in October 2023, including the new Operational Excellence category.
  • Provides continuous evaluation of resource configurations against desired settings.
  • Requires AWS Config to be enabled in the account.

AWS Security Hub Integration

  • Security Hub CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) controls automatically appear as checks in Trusted Advisor.
  • Requires the Foundational Security Best Practices security standard to be enabled in Security Hub.
  • Requires Business Support+ or higher plan.
  • Provides a consolidated view of security findings across both services.

Cost Optimization Hub Integration

  • 16 new cost optimization checks integrated from AWS Cost Optimization Hub (May 2025).
  • Legacy cost optimization checks (e.g., Low Utilization EC2, Underutilized EBS) were deprecated September 2025.
  • New checks provide more accurate savings estimates accounting for specific commercial terms (RIs, Savings Plans).
  • Provides actionable recommendations including right-sizing, Graviton migration, and idle resource detection.
  • Requires opt-in to Cost Optimization Hub and AWS Compute Optimizer (both free).

Amazon EventBridge Integration

  • Trusted Advisor emits events to Amazon EventBridge when check status changes (WARN or ERROR).
  • Enables automated remediation workflows using EventBridge rules + Lambda functions.
  • Can schedule automatic check refreshes using EventBridge Scheduler.
  • Requires Business Support+ or higher plan.

Organizational View

  • Allows viewing Trusted Advisor checks for all accounts in AWS Organizations.
  • Generate consolidated reports with detailed check results across multiple accounts.
  • View high-level summary of check status within the console.
  • Helps optimize security posture, performance, and cost efficiency across multi-account environments.

Trusted Advisor Priority

  • Available to Enterprise Support and Unified Operations customers only.
  • Provides prioritized and context-driven recommendations from the AWS account team.
  • Combines machine-generated checks with human expertise.
  • Helps focus on the most important recommendations for cloud optimization, resilience, and security.
  • Integrates with operational workflows for actionable guidance.

AWS Support API

  • API provides two different groups of operations:
    • Support case management operations to manage the entire life cycle of AWS support cases, from creating a case to resolving it, and includes
      • Open a support case
      • Get a list and detailed information about recent support cases
      • Filter your search for support cases by dates and case identifiers, including resolved cases
      • Add communications and file attachments to cases, and add the email recipients for case correspondence
      • Resolve cases
    • AWS Trusted Advisor operations to access checks
      • Get the names and identifiers for the checks
      • Request that a check be run against the AWS account and resources
      • Get summaries and detailed information for check results
      • Refresh the checks
      • Get the status of each check
  • Requires Business Support+ or higher plan (previously Business/Enterprise On-Ramp/Enterprise).
  • Must use US East (N. Virginia) endpoint for Trusted Advisor API operations.

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  1. The Trusted Advisor service provides insight regarding which categories of an AWS account?
    1. Security, fault tolerance, high availability, and connectivity
    2. Security, access control, high availability, and performance
    3. Performance, cost optimization, security, and fault tolerance (Note – Trusted Advisor now has 6 categories: Cost Optimization, Security, Resilience, Performance, Operational Excellence, and Service Limits)
    4. Performance, cost optimization, access control, and connectivity
  2. Which of the following are categories of AWS Trusted Advisor? (Select TWO.)
    1. Loose Coupling
    2. Disaster recovery
    3. Infrastructure as a Code
    4. Security
    5. Service limits
  3. Which AWS tool will identify security groups that grant unrestricted Internet access to a limited list of ports?
    1. AWS Organizations
    2. AWS Trusted Advisor
    3. AWS Usage Report
    4. Amazon EC2 dashboard
  4. A company wants to receive recommendations to optimize their AWS environment for cost, performance, security, and resilience. Which AWS service provides these recommendations?
    1. AWS Config
    2. AWS Security Hub
    3. AWS Trusted Advisor
    4. AWS Well-Architected Tool
  5. Which AWS Trusted Advisor category was added in October 2023, bringing the total to six categories?
    1. Governance
    2. Compliance
    3. Operational Excellence
    4. Sustainability
  6. A company wants to automate remediation when AWS Trusted Advisor identifies a security issue. Which AWS service integration should they use?
    1. AWS CloudTrail
    2. Amazon EventBridge
    3. Amazon CloudWatch Alarms
    4. AWS Systems Manager
  7. Which AWS Trusted Advisor feature provides prioritized recommendations from your AWS account team and is available only to Enterprise Support and Unified Operations customers?
    1. Trusted Advisor Organizational View
    2. Trusted Advisor Priority
    3. Trusted Advisor Notifications
    4. Trusted Advisor API
  8. A company needs to view Trusted Advisor recommendations for all accounts in their AWS Organization. Which feature should they use?
    1. Trusted Advisor Priority
    2. AWS Config Aggregator
    3. Trusted Advisor Organizational View
    4. AWS Security Hub cross-account

References