Glossary · Operations
What is AWS Trusted Advisor?
AWS-native dashboard offering cost, security, fault-tolerance, performance, and service-limit checks — some free, most requiring Business or Enterprise Support.
By HabileLabs
AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Trusted Advisor is a built-in AWS service that inspects your account and surfaces checks across five categories: cost optimization, security, fault tolerance, performance, and service quotas. Each check produces a colored status (green / yellow / red) with a brief explanation and recommended action.
The free tier (available on Basic and Developer Support) covers only the core security and service-quota checks. The cost-optimization checks — idle EC2 instances, underutilized EBS volumes, and the rest of the 200+ check library — require AWS Business or Enterprise Support, which itself starts at 10% of monthly AWS spend (with minimums).
Trusted Advisor's free tier is the baseline most teams already use; it's where many AWS waste-audit conversations start. The full tier is comprehensive but expensive — for teams without Enterprise Support, third-party platforms like Refine can cover most of the same ground at lower cost.
Related
Idle Resource
An AWS resource that is provisioned and billed but doing no real work — common offenders: unattached EBS volumes, idle EC2, unused elastic IPs, abandoned load balancers.
Right-sizing
Matching the instance type and size to actual workload demand — avoiding both over-provisioning (paying for idle capacity) and under-provisioning (performance pain).
Refine vs AWS Cost Explorer
See how Refine surfaces this in your AWS account.
Find waste like this in your own AWS account — free
60-second IAM-role connection. Read-only. No signup needed for the bill analyzer.
Refine is built and supported by HabileLabs, an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner.