Find the right help: your support plan, Trusted Advisor, AWS Health and the free resources

Steps

1. In the console, open AWS Support Center from the help menu, then the Support plans page. Write down the name of the plan your account holds. For most personal accounts it is Basic. Read the comparison of the four plans, Basic Support, AWS Business Support+, AWS Enterprise Support and AWS Unified Operations, and leave without changing anything. In Support Center, also note how many support cases are listed under your cases, and in CloudShell note the number that aws budgets describe-budgets --account-id 111122223333 --query 'length(Budgets)' prints.
2. Open AWS CloudShell. Confirm your identity, then ask the AWS Support API for the Trusted Advisor checks and the AWS Health API for recent events:

aws sts get-caller-identity --query Arn --output text
aws support describe-trusted-advisor-checks --language en --region us-east-1 --query 'length(checks)'
aws health describe-events --region us-east-1 --max-items 5

If the ARN ends in :root, sign out now: this lab must not run as the root user. On Basic Support, both API calls fail with SubscriptionRequiredException. That error is the lesson: the programmatic routes into AWS Support and AWS Health need a paid plan. On a paid plan, the first prints a number of checks and the second prints events. 3. Open Trusted Advisor in the console and its Recommendations page. Read the categories, which AWS labels Cost optimization, Security, Performance, Fault tolerance, Operational excellence and Service limits (service quotas). Open the cost category and see which checks your plan can run and which are locked. Trusted Advisor inspects your own resources; it does not analyse spending, which is Cost Explorer's job. 4. Open the AWS Health Dashboard. Under Your account health, read the Open and recent issues, Scheduled changes and Other notifications tabs and write down how many items each shows. Then open Service health, the public view of every AWS service, which needs no account at all. One reports what AWS is doing that affects you; the other, what AWS is doing everywhere. 5. Use the free self-service resources for three different needs. On AWS re:Post (repost.aws), search for a question about unexpected charges after deleting resources and read an answer, noting who wrote it. In the Knowledge Center section of re:Post, find an AWS-written article on the same subject. On AWS Prescriptive Guidance, find one pattern for migrating a database to AWS and note its steps. Finally, open the AWS Budgets user guide on docs.aws.amazon.com. Read only; there is nothing to post. 6. Find the route for reporting abuse from AWS resources to the AWS Trust and Safety team on the AWS website, and read what it asks for: the source IP address, the kind of abuse and the evidence, such as logs. Leave the form unsent. It is for real abuse coming from an AWS IP address, not for practice. 7. Back in Support Center, open the case form only far enough to read its options, then leave without sending anything. Note which case types your plan offers: account and billing on every plan, technical only on a paid one. Then write one line for each scenario, naming the resource: ask the community; an AWS-written answer to a common question; a vetted migration pattern; best-practice checks on my resources; AWS maintenance that affects my instance; an attack from an AWS IP address.