Route 53 and CloudTrail Checks for the AWS Trusted Advisor

The AWS Trusted Advisor monitors your AWS resources and provides you with advice for cost optimization, security, performance, and fault tolerance. Today we are adding five additional checks that will be of benefit to users of Amazon Route 53 (Domain Name Services) and AWS CloudTrail (recording and logging of AWS API calls). With today’s launch, Trusted Advisor now performs a total of 37 checks, up from just 26 six months ago.

New Checks
There are four Route 53 checks and one CloudTrail check. Let’s start with Route 53, and take a look at each check.

As you may know, Route 53 is a highly available and scalable DNS (Domain Name Service) web service. When you use Route 53 for a domain, you create a series of record sets. Each record set provides Route 53 with the information needed to map a name to a set of IP addresses. Today we are adding a set of checks to help you to use Route 53 in the most effective way possible.

The Latency Resource Record Sets check looks for proper and efficient use of latency record sets. A proper record set will always contain records for more than one AWS Region.

The MX and SPF Resource Record Sets check helps to improve email deliverability by checking for an SPF record for each MX record.

The Failover Resource Record Sets check verifies the configuration of record sets that are used to implement failover to a secondary resource set.

The Deleted Health Check check looks for record sets that refer to health checks which have been deleted.

AWS CloudTrail records and logs calls to the AWS API functions. The CloudTrail Logging check verifies that logging is properly configured and working as expected.

Check Today
If you have signed up for AWS Support at the Business or Enterprise level, you have access to the Trusted Advisor at no additional change.

— Jeff;