AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Using AWS Trusted Advisor to Drive Operational Excellence with Ensono Envision Advisor
By Chris Mills, Sr. Partner Technical Account Manager – AWS
By Matt LaBarre, Sr. Product Manager – Ensono
By Asim Ahmed, Product Marketing Manager – Ensono
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If you’re using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run your applications and services, you may be familiar with AWS Trusted Advisor, a service that inspects your AWS environment and provides recommendations to optimize infrastructure, improve security and performance, reduce cost, and monitor service quotas.
AWS Trusted Adviser provides a lot of data, which can make it challenging for some users to get started and determine the priorities, impact, and owners for each recommendation.
Ensono Envision Advisor is a tool that turns AWS Trusted Adviser recommendations into validated, prioritized, actionable insights. It ingests Trusted Advisor data before enriching it with Ensono IP to contextualize recommendations specific to end customers, making it easier to achieve operational excellence on AWS.
In this post, we will explore some of the challenges customers face when using AWS Trusted Advisor, and how Ensono Envision Advisor can help. Ensono is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller that helps customers transform their traditional environments with AWS.
Customer Challenge
AWS Trusted Advisor performs a comprehensive and systematic check on the configuration of resources customers run on AWS, across 250+ best practice checks. These have been authored by subject matter experts (SMEs) from the service teams at AWS and allow customers to see where they have opportunities and risks, across cost, performance, security, fault tolerance, and monitoring service quotas.
For customers with significant workloads on AWS, the comprehensive nature of the tool means they must review a report with (potentially) hundreds of checks in either “Warning” or “Error” state, referencing many thousands of underlying resources.
The challenge then becomes how to get started:
- Which accounts, checks, and resources should be prioritized?
- Will there be any adverse impact from making the change?
- Who owns these resources, and who should make the decision?
- How do I manage the change in-line with established ITIL processes?
Prioritization, ownership, workload context, and governance information are key to turning AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations into actionable insights that drive operational excellence on AWS. Ensono recognized this challenge on behalf of its customers and developed Ensono Envision Advisor.
Ensono Envision Advisor
Ensono Envision Advisor is an integral component of Ensono Envision, a comprehensive IT insights platform which serves as the backbone of Ensono’s service delivery, streamlining operations management, facilitating governance and reporting, and helping ensure security and compliance across customers’ infrastructure.
Ensono Envision Advisor leverages AWS Trusted Advisor to provide Ensono customers with prioritized and context-driven recommendations from the Ensono account team, along with machine-generated checks from AWS services.
Customers can view these recommendations in Ensono Envision, along with other relevant information such as resource utilization, compliance status, incident history, and more. This provides a holistic view of the AWS environment and helps customers make informed decisions.
Ensono Envision Advisor is integrated directly into Ensono’s managed service offerings, powering an integrated and efficient workflow for changes that are implemented in a safe, controlled, ITIL-compliant managed service. Ensono account teams filter, prioritize, and validate recommendations before reviewing with customers to determine the best course of action. Ensono will then execute and track approved changes according to the customer’s preferences and policies.
The primary business benefits of Ensono Envision Advisor include:
- Single operational health view of customer’s AWS environments.
- Prioritization of business and technical risks, impacting their business workloads.
- Provides transparency, offering customers a unified view of the proactive actions being recommended by Ensono.
- Cost optimization recommendations built in.
- Management information reporting, tracking the changing health of customer’s AWS environments over time.
- Collaborative working surface used to discover, plan, and action proactive, healthy changes.
How it Works
Ensono Envision Advisor, built on AWS, takes daily data feeds from AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Security Hub. Incorporating data feeds from these AWS services provides Ensono’s customers with a holistic view on their AWS environment across operational excellence and security.
Ensono Envision Advisor uses the API endpoints for AWS Security Hub and AWS Trusted Advisor, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store, (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow.
Figure 1 – High-level solution architecture.
The primary technical benefits of Ensono Envision Advisor are:
- Resource-level tracking, enabling technical personnel to view the remediation life cycle of resources affected by AWS Trusted Advisor recommendations.
- Linking affected resources with their technical owners. Daily notifications enable the right person/team to action recommendations quickly.
- Prioritization of technical recommendations, enabling resources to be focused on high-value remediation, removing the maximum amount of risk in the shortest timeframe.
- Portal-driven remediation, enabling technical owners to assess and remediate themselves, or have Ensono’s technical teams address on their behalf.
Results Achieved
Before developing the Ensono Envision Advisor, their team initiated monthly AWS Trusted Advisor reviews for customers. These covered different areas such as cost optimization, performance, and security recommendations.
The response time from customers on acting upon these recommendations was often prolonged. Moreover, during Savings Plan/Reserved Instance renewal preparation, extensive effort was invested in creating detailed spreadsheets suggesting instance resizes or upgrades for customer environments. Despite these efforts, there was a constant need to remind customers to review and determine their subsequent action plan.
The introduction of the Ensono Envision Advisor transformed this process. For one customer, not only did they right-size 25 virtual machines and identify significant cost-saving measures, but the solution facilitated the customer in effortlessly navigating and visualizing all recommendations in one consolidated place. This streamlined approach eliminated the need for redundant reminders and provided the customer with a comprehensive overview of their cloud infrastructure.
As a result, the customer realized substantial monthly savings, including a notable $10,000 from the right-sizing initiatives alone. By eliminating unneeded servers and storage, and through enhanced operational efficiency and a bolstered security posture, the customer achieved a more cost-efficient and fortified cloud environment.
“Over the past two months, Ensono Envision Advisor has had a marked impact on our operations,” said an Ensono customer in the education sector. “Acting as a one-stop shop, it helps us pinpoint crucial cost-saving measures and potential security issues within our public cloud IT, such as identifying underutilized EC2 resources. This led to a notable reduction in our monthly AWS bill. Ensono Envision Advisor goes beyond being a mere tool—it ensures we maintain a robust security posture and efficient infrastructure management.”
Summary
Ensono Envision Advisor helps customers optimize their AWS environments with Ensono managed services. It combines the best practices of AWS Trusted Advisor with the expertise and experience of Ensono technical account teams. It provides a comprehensive and actionable view of a customer’s AWS resources and operations.
With Ensono Envision Advisor, customers can achieve better outcomes for their business, while reducing complexity, cost, and risk. You can also learn more about Ensono in AWS Marketplace.
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Ensono – AWS Partner Spotlight
Ensono is an AWS Partner and managed service provider specializing in mainframe modernization, Microsoft workloads, and migrations to AWS.