Health Score
The Health Score is a single number between 0 and 100 that reflects the overall architectural health of your monitored AWS infrastructure. It provides an at-a-glance indicator of how well your environment follows best practices across multiple dimensions, and how it changes over time.
A score of 100 represents an environment with no detected issues across any dimension. As findings and risks are detected, the score decreases proportionally to their number and severity. The score recovers as issues are resolved.
The Five Health Factors
The Health Score is calculated from five weighted factors, each representing a core dimension of infrastructure quality:
1. Security
The security factor evaluates the severity and volume of active security findings in your environment. It considers:
- The number of active findings at each severity level (critical, high, medium, low)
- The types of security misconfigurations detected
- Whether critical security controls are in place (encryption, access management, logging)
Higher-severity findings have a greater impact on this factor. A single critical finding reduces the security factor more than several low-severity findings combined.
2. Reliability
The reliability factor assesses your infrastructure's resilience and ability to withstand failures. It considers:
- Whether resources have redundancy (multi-AZ deployments, load balancing, auto-scaling)
- The presence of single points of failure
- Backup and recovery configurations
- The concentration of resources in a single availability zone
The Failure Simulator and Risk Radar provide detailed information about reliability gaps. Use them to identify the specific resources and patterns affecting your reliability score.
3. Performance
The performance factor evaluates whether your resources are appropriately sized and configured for their workloads. It considers:
- Resource utilisation levels (over-provisioned or under-provisioned)
- Whether performance best practices are followed (caching, CDN usage, optimised storage types)
- Network configuration efficiency
4. Cost Efficiency
The cost efficiency factor reflects how effectively your infrastructure spending is optimised. It considers:
- The presence of idle or underutilised resources
- Opportunities for reserved capacity or savings plans
- Storage optimisation opportunities (such as using newer, more cost-effective storage types)
- Consolidation opportunities for duplicate or redundant resources
This factor is informed by both the Architecture Advisor's risk detection and the Cost Intelligence module's recommendations. Together they provide a complete picture of cost optimisation opportunities.
5. Operational Excellence
The operational excellence factor assesses your infrastructure's observability, governance, and operational maturity. It considers:
- Logging and monitoring coverage
- Infrastructure-as-code adoption and drift detection
- Tagging compliance
- Automation coverage
How the Score Works
The Health Score uses a diminishing-impact model. This means:
- Early improvements have the biggest effect. Resolving your first few critical findings produces a noticeable score increase.
- The score becomes harder to move as it gets higher. Going from 40 to 60 is easier than going from 80 to 95, because each remaining issue has proportionally less impact.
- Severity matters more than volume. Resolving one critical finding improves your score more than resolving several low-severity findings.
This model reflects the reality of infrastructure governance -- addressing the most important issues first delivers the most value, and achieving a perfect score requires sustained attention to best practices across all dimensions.
The Health Score recalculates automatically after every scan. Historical scores are retained, allowing you to track improvement trends over time.
Reading Your Score
| Score Range | Interpretation |
|---|---|
| 90 - 100 | Excellent. Your infrastructure follows best practices across all dimensions. Minor optimisations may remain. |
| 70 - 89 | Good. Your environment is well-managed with some areas for improvement. Review medium-severity findings. |
| 50 - 69 | Needs attention. Significant gaps exist in one or more dimensions. Prioritise high-severity findings. |
| Below 50 | Critical. Serious architectural weaknesses are present. Address critical findings immediately. |
Improving Your Score
The most effective strategy for improving your Health Score is to address findings in order of severity:
- Resolve critical findings first. These have the largest individual impact on your score.
- Address high-severity architecture risks. Single points of failure and missing redundancy significantly affect the reliability factor.
- Act on cost recommendations. Eliminating idle resources and rightsizing improves the cost efficiency factor.
- Close compliance gaps. These often overlap with security and operational findings.
- Optimise operational practices. Improve logging coverage, enforce tagging, and adopt infrastructure-as-code.
Navigate to the Action Centre and sort findings by severity to see which issues will have the greatest impact on your score. The AI Assistant can also recommend the most impactful actions -- ask "How can I improve my health score?"
Score History and Trends
Guardian Pro stores daily health score snapshots, allowing you to track how your infrastructure health evolves over time. You can view score trends on the Dashboard and within the Architecture Advisor overview.
Score trends are useful for:
- Demonstrating improvement to leadership and compliance auditors
- Detecting regressions when new deployments introduce architectural weaknesses
- Measuring the impact of remediation campaigns
- Setting baselines before and after infrastructure changes
Per-Account Scores
When your organisation has multiple AWS accounts connected, the Health Score can be viewed at two levels:
- Organisation-wide -- An aggregated score across all monitored accounts (default view)
- Per-account -- Use the account selector in the navigation bar to view the health score for a specific account
This allows you to identify which accounts need the most attention and allocate remediation effort accordingly.
Relationship to Other Metrics
The Health Score complements other metrics in Guardian Pro:
- Compliance Score -- Measures adherence to specific regulatory frameworks. The Health Score is broader, covering architectural quality beyond compliance requirements.
- Risk Radar -- Identifies specific architectural risks. The Health Score aggregates these into a single indicator.
- Cost Analysis -- Provides spending details. The cost efficiency factor of the Health Score reflects optimisation opportunities, not absolute spend.
Next Steps
- Risk Radar -- Understand the specific risks affecting your Health Score.
- Action Centre -- Address findings to improve your score.
- Growth Readiness -- Assess whether your architecture supports your scaling plans.