AWS Trusted Advisor

A check service that highlights improvement points in your AWS environment.

AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that checks AWS environments across cost, security, performance, and fault tolerance.

• Cost reduction checks
• Security setting reviews
• Identifying unused resources

• Performs checks aligned with best practices
• Used for cost optimization and security perspectives
• Available check coverage depends on the support plan

• A good starting point for operational improvement
• Use Trusted Advisor findings to revisit cost and availability
• Review findings periodically in production

AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that inspects an AWS environment across five categories — cost optimization, security, fault tolerance, performance, and service quotas — and provides improvement recommendations aligned with best practices. The checks are automatically executed based on items predefined by AWS, and the results can be reviewed by category in the management console. Representative check items include enabling MFA on the IAM root user, S3 bucket public access, unused EC2 Elastic IPs, low-utilization EC2 instances, and service quota usage. The number of available check items differs depending on the support plan. Basic Support and Developer Support provide selected items in the security and fault tolerance categories (MFA on root account, S3 bucket permissions, public EBS/RDS snapshots, security group port openings, and others) along with all items in the service quotas category. Business Support and above provide all categories and all check items (refer to the official documentation for the latest count), with additional capabilities such as automated retrieval through the API and weekly improvement reports. In exam contexts, the point that the scope of checks varies by support plan is repeatedly asked, so it helps to remember that Basic and Developer cover some security and fault tolerance checks plus all service quota checks, while Business and above cover all items. In practice, typical use cases include leveraging the cost optimization category of Trusted Advisor to surface unused resources (EBS volumes attached to stopped EC2 instances, unused Elastic IPs, low-utilization RDS) and reduce costs, and using the security category to continuously monitor for misconfigurations in IAM, S3, and security groups. While its role partially overlaps with AWS Config Rules and AWS Security Hub, the distinct value of Trusted Advisor lies in providing evaluations specifically against AWS best practices.

• AWS Trusted Advisor (AWS Official Documentation)
• AWS Trusted Advisor (AWS Official)

Last updated: 2026-06-07