AWS Support - What's New

We are happy to announce the launch of our public beta APIs for AWS Support! Using these APIs, customers on Business and Enterprise-level support plans can now integrate case management functionality into their support tools and applications. The Support API also contains the Trusted Advisor report for your AWS account, allowing programmatic access to recommendations for cost savings, enhanced security, increased performance, and improved fault tolerance.

Please find official documentation about this new service here:

• Developer Guide
• API Reference

We have also added a new category to the forum.

• Trusted Advisor: When we launched Trusted Advisor, we had a goal of releasing software that would help provide targeted insights to customers helping them run more secure, more available, and at a lower cost. We are excited to have helped thousands of customers, make tens of thousands of changes and save millions of dollars. We now have 26 checks, including the latest 3 released last month; RDS Security Group Access Risk, EC2 Security Group Rule Proliferation, and EC2 Instance Security Group Rule Proliferation. For more information on AWS Trusted Advisor and the other 26 checks, click here.
• Case Correspondence Ratings: To ensure that each case gets the attention that it deservers we have implemented a new feature in the Support Center that allows customers to provide real-time feedback on their support experience. Within a case, each individual correspondence can be assigned a 1 to 5 star rating, allowing support engineers to provide additional case assistance and quality oversight to ensure a high level of support satisfaction.
• Private Support API Beta: We released Chat support in June and IAM access in November, and we are expanding communication channels again to include APIs. Using the APIs you can integrate support into your support applications to create cases, update correspondence, and view your Trusted Advisor report. If you are a Business or Enterprise-level support subscriber and would like to participate in the Private Beta for Support APIs, please contact us by opening a Customer Service ticket in the Support Center and mention "Request for Private Support API Beta Access" in the Subject.

Customers can now access the AWS Support Center using their IAM credentials create and manage cases, view their Trusted Advisor report, and manage Support for Health Check cases. We are also happy to announce two more identity related checks; MFA enabled on root account, and password policy configuration. For more detail on how to configure support access for your IAM users, click here.

In addition to closing security gaps and improving system performance, the Trusted Advisor report will proactively alert customers when opportunities exist to save money. Savings can occur from releasing unused resources, consolidating underutilized resources, or committing to reserved resources at recommended levels. Customers who viewed these proactive alerts were shown $28M in total saving opportunities per month and on average, these changes have led to $2.4M in customer annualized savings per month.

• Underutilized EBS Volumes: This check examines EBS volume configurations and warns when EBS volumes appear to be underutilized. All EBS volumes accrue charges once created. If an EBS volume remains unattached or has very low write activity (excluding boot volumes) for a period of time, the EBS volume is likely not being used.
• EBS Provisioned IOPS Attachment Configuration: EC2 instance that has a Provisioned IOPS capable EBS volume attached, but has not been configured to enable PIOPS.
• ASG Health Check: This check examines AutoScaling Group health check configurations and warns when an ELB health check is not enabled when an AutoScaling Group has an associated ELB. Recommended configuration for any AutoScaling Group associated with an ELB is to use ELB health check.

For more information on AWS Trusted Advisor and the other 17 checks, click here.