Hello and welcome to this short lecture where I want to summarise some of the key elements of what we have covered throughout this introductory course.

I started off by explaining what the service is and what it does, here I explained that: 

• The main function of Trusted Advisor is to recommend improvements across your AWS account to help optimize your environment based on AWS best practices
• Trusted Advisor focuses on 5 categories with a list of best practice checks in each:
• Cost optimization 
• Performance 
• Security 
• Fault Tolerance 
• Service Limits
• The list of available checks to your account is dependant on your AWS Support Plan
• Business and Enterprise support can take full advantage of all the checks available
• All other AWS accounts only have access to 6 free core checks in the Security category, plus the Service Limit checks.

The Security checks are:

• Security Groups - Specific Ports Unrestricted
• Amazon EBS Public Snapshots
• Amazon RDS Public Snapshots
• IAM Use
• MFA on root account

There are a number of useful features within Trusted Advisor, these being:

• Trusted Advisor Notifications - This tracks your resource check changes and cost-saving estimates over the course of a week and e-mail you a report
• Exclude Items - This allows you to select specific resources to be excluded from appearing in the console within a specific check.  
• Action Links - Action Links lead you on to remediate any issue identified
• Access Management - Using IAM you can grant different levels of access to Trusted Advisor
• Refresh - You can perform a manual refresh 5 minutes after the previous refresh against either individual checks or against all checks

Following this, I focused on reviewing checks and taking appropriate action. 

• A summary is provided for each category displaying how many checks require no action, how many need investigation, and how many should be looked at immediately
• For every check that Trusted Advisor provides you will see:
• A description 
• Alert Criteria
• Recommended Action
• Additional Resources

This lecture also included a demonstration where I provided an overview of the dashboard and performed the following steps:

• Provided an overview of the dashboard
• Drilled down into the Trusted Advisor Checks
• Identified and rectified the issues that were displayed 
• Refreshed Trusted Advisor to ensure the issues had been resolved
• Downloaded the status of the checks as an Excel file for offline review

I also provided an overview of each of the core checks available to all AWS accounts.

You should now have a greater understanding of what AWS Trusted Advisor is and does and how you can use it within your environment to optimize your infrastructure.  It is a powerful tool especially if you do have a Business or Enterprise support plan to fully maximize its potential.

If you have any feedback on this course, positive or negative, please do send an e-mail to support@cloudacademy.com, your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time and good luck with your continued learning of cloud computing. 

Thank you.