AWS Trusted Advisor vs. Compute Optimizer: A Comparison

Optimizing your AWS environment to ensure security, cost and performance is key to having an efficient, safe cloud space. There are both AWS and external tools available to help you with that challenge. Here we’re going to analyze AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Compute Optimizer, two AWS-native tools that help you with different aspects of your cloud usage. 

What Does Each Tool Do?

AWS Trusted Advisor

Trusted Advisor is your AWS partner providing you with real-time guidance to help you follow AWS best practices. It focuses on cost optimization, security, performance, and fault tolerance. It provides you with automated checks for service limits, security settings, and recommendations on cost-saving.

AWS Compute Optimizer

AWS Compute Optimizer is a tool that’s designed to automatically analyze the configuration and usage patterns of AWS services to recommend optimal compute resources. It gives you recommendations for EC2 instances, EBS volumes, and Lambda functions based on usage. With those recommendations, you can see potential cost savings and performance improvements by resizing or changing resource types.

AWS Trusted Advisor vs. AWS Compute Optimizer: A Detailed Comparison

These two AWS native tools can be easily used within your account to look at different aspects of your cloud usage.

Their Purpose and Focus

AWS Trusted Advisor is a broad tool. It focuses on overall account health and optimization across multiple areas, including security, performance, cost optimization, fault tolerance, and service quotas. Whereas AWS Compute Optimizer is more specific. It only manages compute resource optimization.

Their Target Audience

AWS Compute Optimizer is best for technical teams focused on efficient resource utilization and performance tuning. It provides you with niche recommendations. But Trusted Advisor benefits administrators and finance teams looking for a holistic view of their AWS environments, as it looks at your account as a whole. 

Their Pricing

• Compute Optimizer: Free with 14-day history, otherwise, you can get enhanced infrastructure metrics, (including Amazon EC2, Auto Scaling group, or Amazon RDS recommendations). They cost $0.0003360215 per resource per hour and are charged based on the number of hours per month the resource is running. So if it was used for a full month, it would cost $0.25 per resource.
• Trusted Advisor: It is free but it provides more detailed information when you have higher support plans.

Introducing Stratusphere™ FinOps as an Alternative

Stratusphere FinOps focuses on cost optimization by analyzing your workloads, and how you’re using your resources.

When to Consider Stratusphere™ FinOps

Stratusphere FinOps is an ideal tool when your enterprise has a complex AWS environment or many AWS accounts. A key difference between Stratusphere FinOps and the AWS tools listed above is that it provides you with a single dashboard showing all of your AWS financial recommendations in one place.

It’s also highly recommended for private equity firms as actionable optimization insights ranked by level of effort (LoE) and accurate estimates of dollars saved per optimization. You can easily see which PortCo is performing best in the cloud, and increase the time to value.

Different to Trusted Advisor, Stratusphere FinOps provides you with a more in-depth understanding of your cloud spending. Then, in contrast with Compute Optimizer it gives you more data and reporting.

Key Features of Stratusphere™ FinOps:

• Advanced analytics 
• Customizable reports
• Share data easily and safely
• Prioritized optimization recommendations
• Real-time cost analysis and control

Begin Saving on AWS Costs Now –Try Stratusphere™ for Free!

To see all your AWS spending clearly in one place, prioritize actions and improvements, and view prepared dashboards with full cost analysis, try Stratusphere FinOps. 

Our 30-day free trial allows you to deep dive your cloud spending and optimize it easily.

BONUS: Find Out if Your Organization is Ready for The Cloud ⤵️