What Is AWS Trusted Advisor?
Trusted Advisor is an online tool offered by AWS to provide you real-time assistance regarding your AWS resources. It optimizes your AWS infrastructure, improves security and performance, reduces your overall costs, and monitors service limits. If you want to establish new workflows, develop applications, or as part of ongoing improvement, take advantage of the recommendations provided by Trusted Advisor on a regular basis to help keep your solutions provisioned optimally.
Features of AWS Trusted Advisor:
- Email Notifications: To help you stay up-to-date with a summary of status across your checks, Trusted Advisor provides you notification features. It notifies you weekly via email when you opt in for this feature. A refresh of checks is required to ensure an up-to-date summary of check status in your email notification.
- Recent Changes: AWS Management Console dashboard lets you track recent changes or check the status in the AWS. You can see the most recent changes at the top of the list. However, this feature is available with AWS Business Support and AWS Enterprise Support.
- Exclude Items: This feature helps you with customization. By choosing "exclude items", you can customize the Trusted Advisor report. If you think that some items from the check result are irrelevant, you can exclude those items. Since the excluded items appear separately, you can restore (include) them at any time.
- Action Links: Items in a Trusted Advisor report have hyperlinks to the console, where you can take action on the Trusted Advisor recommendations.
- Access Management: You can use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control access to specific checks or check categories.
- AWS Support API: By using AWS Support API, you can refresh and retrieve Trusted Advisor results programmatically. Although this feature is also available with AWS Business Support and AWS Enterprise Support.
- Refresh: If you want to refresh individual checks or refresh all the checks at once, you can do it by clicking the Refresh All button in the top-right corner of the summary dashboard. The minimum refresh interval varies based on the check.
- Amazon CloudWatch Integration: By integrating Amazon CloudWatch Events, you can detect and react to changes in the status of Trusted Advisor checks. But you can use this feature only if you have AWS Business Support and AWS Enterprise Support.
Benefits of AWS Trusted Advisor:
- Cost Optimization: AWS Trusted Advisor helps you discover unused or idle resources, which can be used optimally. Once you are aware of the resources that are costing you and still of no use, you can eliminate them or use them strategically. This way you can save your money. For example, Idle Load Balancers identify load balancers that are either not connected to any back-end instances or handling extremely low traffic.
- Performance: Sometimes your organization might be using some resources explicitly for a longer period of time. Since it impacts the performance and still continues to happen due to negligence, such practices need serious attention. AWS Trusted Advisor checks your service limits and ensures better performance. For example, High Utilization Amazon EC2 Instances checks the CPU utilization during the previous two weeks and sends alerts if daily utilization exceeds 90% for more than three days, as consistently high utilization can lead to application performance issues.
- Security: Loopholes in the technology can pose serious threats to the security of an application. Hence, AWS Trusted Advisor monitors the security of your application by closing gaps, enabling various AWS security features, and examining your permissions. For example, MFA on Root Account checks if multi-factor authentication (MFA) has been enabled or not on a root account, as enabling MFA on root accounts, enhances security.
- Fault Tolerance: AWS Trusted Advisor can increase the availability and redundancy of your AWS application by taking advantage of auto-scaling, health checks, multi-AZ, and backup capabilities. For example, Amazon RDS Multi-AZ checks if the DB instance has been deployed in a single availability zone. In such cases, a DB failure will cause an outage because of a lack of high availability. Alternatively, a high-availability setup resumes operating from the standby database without any disruption to the business.
- Service Limits: AWS Trusted Advisor checks for service usage that is more than 80% of the service limit. This way it increases the overall performance of the AWS application on the cloud.
Case Study:
At Hungama Digital Media Entertainment Pvt. Ltd., some of the EC2 instances were highly over-provisioned and underutilized. Plus, some of the test servers were never shut down after the completion of special projects. Checks on EBS volumes showed similar findings that identified underutilized EBS volumes used for test projects.
To correct all these inaccuracies while handling the resources, the organization used AWS Trusted Advisor to perform cost optimization audits on Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon EBS volumes in the company’s environment. As a result, company was able to:
- Do optimization exercise, where many volumes were deleted and snapshots were saved on Amazon S3.
- Shut down test servers automatically during lean hours and the over-provisioned servers were adjusted to a more efficient size.
Conclusion:
AWS Trusted Advisor is one of the reasons that will woo you to choose AWS for your cloud environment needs. You must have heard that most of the cloud vendors take care of the maintenance of the online servers, but AWS Trusted Advisor helps you cut down your expenses, which you might be bearing because of negligence.
