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AWS Trusted Advisor

AWS Trusted Advisor is a built-in AWS advisory tool that scans your account and surfaces recommendations across cost optimization, security, performance, fault tolerance, and service limits.

How It Works

Trusted Advisor runs automated checks against your AWS account and compares your configuration against AWS best practices. For cost optimization, it identifies resources that appear underutilized or idle, such as EC2 instances with low CPU usage, unattached Elastic IP addresses, or underused RDS instances. Each check produces a status indicator and a recommendation, which you can review inside the AWS console. The depth of checks available to you depends on your AWS Support plan. Basic and Developer support plans include a limited set of checks, while Business and Enterprise plans unlock the full catalog. A trusted Advisor does not take action on your behalf. It only surfaces findings for your team to act on.

Why It Matters for Cloud Cost

Without a tool like Trusted Advisor, engineering and finance teams may have no visibility into wasteful or misconfigured resources until the bill arrives. Trusted Advisor closes part of that visibility gap by flagging obvious inefficiencies before they compound. However, it has a structural limitation for commitment-based savings: its recommendations reflect usage patterns from a prior window, and the refresh cadence means the data teams act on can be out of date. That lag matters most when workloads are changing quickly. Trusted Advisor also does not purchase or manage Savings Plans or Reserved Instances on your behalf. Acting on its commitment recommendations still requires manual review, approval, and execution by your team.

Usage AI: While Trusted Advisor surfaces recommendations for review, Usage AI’s Autopilot goes further by purchasing and adjusting Savings Plans and Reserved Instances daily on your behalf, without requiring manual action, saving customers 30 to 50% on AWS spend.

See how Usage AI saves 30 to 50% on AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Related Terms

AWS EKS Costs

AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) costs are the charges AWS bills for running managed Kubernetes clusters, including the cluster control plane fee, compute for worker nodes, data transfer, and attached storage.

AWS Budgets

AWS Budgets is a cost management service that lets organizations set custom spend, usage, and RI/Savings Plan coverage thresholds and receive automated alerts when costs approach those limits.

AWS Spot Instance Advisor

The AWS Spot Instance Advisor is a free tool from AWS that shows historical interruption rates and discount levels for Spot Instance types across regions, helping teams select instances less likely to be reclaimed.