Microsoft Azure provides cloud solutions for virtually every business application. While it’s easy to access Azure services, configuring them in a way that optimizes resources while maintaining peak performance can be a challenge.
Enter Azure Advisor: a free, personalized cloud computing consultant designed to help you configure Azure services effectively and drive business success.
Whether you’re looking to enhance security, cut costs, boost performance, or ensure high availability, Azure Advisor provides actionable recommendations tailored to your specific workloads.
In this article, we discuss more about Azure Advisor — what it is, its features and benefits, the kind of recommendations it provides, and how you can access and use it.
What Is Azure Advisor?
Source: Microsoft Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor is a native tool offered by Microsoft Azure to help organizations optimize their cloud resources effectively. It provides personalized, actionable recommendations across five key areas: cost, performance, security, reliability, and operational excellence.
By analyzing your workloads and configurations, it identifies inefficiencies, highlights potential risks, and suggests best practices to enhance your environment. Integrated directly into the Azure portal, Azure Advisor simplifies decision-making with clear, easy-to-implement guidance tailored to your specific setup.
Azure Advisor provides:
- Actionable best practice recommendations that align with an organization’s unique workloads and goals
- Step-by-step guidance
- Cloud scores to assess how well-architected your workloads are
- Alerts to notify you of new recommendations
In short, Azure Advisor is your go-to consultant for finding cost inefficiencies while maintaining performance and staying aligned with Azure best practices.
How much does Azure Advisor cost?
You can access Azure Advisor and all of its features for free, regardless of your Microsoft Azure subscription or service level. While the recommendations are always free, the implementation can sometimes incur costs – depending on the action being taken.
Features and Benefits of Azure Advisor
Let’s explore the key features of Azure Advisor and how these capabilities translate into tangible benefits for organizations looking to maximize the value of their Microsoft Azure deployments.
Personalized recommendations
Azure Advisor continuously monitors and analyzes configurations and compute usage patterns. Using built-in best practices, Azure Advisor identifies areas for improvement and provides recommendations categorized by performance, security, reliability, cost-efficiency, and operational efficiency.
For instance, it can identify idle virtual machines driving unnecessary costs, recommend resizing over-provisioned resources, or suggest enabling security features like Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). These insights are based on real-time analysis of your configurations and usage patterns, ensuring the guidance is directly relevant to your environment.
You can configure Azure Advisor to target specific subscriptions and resource groups to focus on critical optimizations. It will show you actions you can perform to make the most of an opportunity or resolve an issue.
Integrated dashboard
Azure Advisor consolidates recommendations from all services (e.g., Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure SQL DB Advisor, Azure App Service) in a centralized dashboard. This makes it easy to review, prioritize, and take action across Azure resources — all from a single hub.
The Advisor dashboard is intuitive and integrated, allowing you to share recommendations with your team, department, or stakeholders. You can also view the affected resources.
With Advisor Quick Fix, you can act on specific recommendations that carry the Quick Fix label, allowing you to address multiple resources simultaneously with just a few clicks. However, this feature is only available for certain recommendations, so it’s important to check if the recommendations you want to act on are supported. The dashboard also allows you to assess how well your workloads adhere to best practices using Azure Advisor score.
Image Source: Azure Quick Fix
Step-by-step guidance and quick actions
Each recommendation provided by Azure Advisor has clear and actionable step-by-step instructions on how to resolve identified issues. For example, Advisor might recommend enabling security features or upgrading a virtual machine.
Recommendations also include direct links to the resource or setting that needs correcting. In other words, if the tool recommends enabling Azure Defender, you’ll see a link to a configuration page where you can do so.
Whatever the recommendation, Advisor is designed to help you save time on cloud optimization. Detailed step-by-step instructions, direct links, and seamless navigation enable you to address issues efficiently and effectively.
Cloud score for workload assessment
The Advisor score serves as a benchmark to help you understand how effectively your Azure resources align with best practices. It evaluates how well-architected your workloads are — and how much you stand to gain from the recommendations, based on industry best practices and Microsoft’s extensive cloud security expertise.
Advisor score prioritizes the most impactful recommendations you can take. It also monitors and tracks progress toward optimizing the cost, security, reliability, operational excellence, and performance of your Azure resources. This helps you prioritize improvements and track progress over time.
Proactive alerts for new recommendations
To ensure you never miss an opportunity to optimize, you can configure alerts that notify you about newly available recommendations. You can then take the suggested actions immediately, postpone them, or dismiss them entirely. What’s more, you can share the recommendations with teams, departments, and other stakeholders.
What Types of Recommendations Does Azure Advisor Provide?
Azure Advisor has a framework of five categories across which it provides recommendations.
Reliability
The tool provides a range of recommendations to help ensure the continuity and resilience of business-critical applications. It identifies points of failure or gaps in your configurations that would hinder your applications from remaining operational in the face of unexpected disruptions, such as hardware failures.
For instance, it may recommend adding a load balancer to ensure traffic distribution, enabling geo-redundancy for regional outages, or setting up automated backups to prevent data loss. Additionally, for workloads with fluctuating demand, Advisor might suggest configuring auto-scaling to maintain responsiveness during peak usage. These recommendations ensure your critical applications remain operational and efficient, even during unexpected disruptions.
Security
Azure Advisor strengthens security by detecting potential threats and vulnerabilities in your Azure deployments that might lead to security breaches, and it provides actionable recommendations to mitigate them.
Advisor’s integration with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, formerly known as Azure Security Center, strengthens its ability to highlight vulnerabilities like open network ports, exposed virtual machines, or misconfigured firewalls.
Advisor also continuously monitors resources to detect security gaps, such as missing encryption or outdated software configurations. And it performs compliance checks and flags deviations from security standards that could lead to a breach.
From network security to access controls, these security recommendations ensure your Azure deployments are as protected as possible.
Performance
Azure Advisor’s recommendations help you optimize application performance and improve the speed and efficiency of your applications. Performance recommendations include:
- Resource configuration
- Network optimization
- Database tuning
- Scaling solutions
- Cache recommendations
For example, its Enable Autoscale recommendation can help you better handle higher call volumes and reduce the number of 4xx errors.
Advisor might also suggest upgrading a service to the latest SDK version to get the best results in terms of model quality, performance, and service availability. Or it may recommend adjusting your region counts to avoid blocked updates.
Cost
Azure Advisor helps you optimize costs by identifying inefficiencies and recommending actionable steps to eliminate waste. It analyzes your resource usage and flags underutilized or idle resources, such as virtual machines or storage accounts, suggesting adjustments like resizing, shutting down, or reassigning them.
It also identifies opportunities to leverage cost-saving options like Azure Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, or Spot VMs to reduce expenses for predictable or non-critical workloads. These insights enable you to align your cloud spending with your business needs, ensuring maximum value without compromising performance or reliability.
Operational excellence
Azure Advisor provides operational excellence recommendations to help you achieve process and workflow efficiency, resource manageability, and deployment best practices.
Recommendations can include automation suggestions, proactive issue resolution, and centralized actionable insights across performance, security, cost, and reliability. This simplifies decision-making and helps teams prioritize actions with the greatest impact on operational efficiency.
Advisor might also recommend upgrading for performance improvements and new feature capabilities, reducing cache policy, or increasing deployments.
How to Access and Use Azure Advisor
You can access Advisor through the Azure portal. Simply sign in to the portal and locate Advisor on the navigation pane or search for it in the All Services menu. The Advisor Overview page opens by default. Here, you can view personalized and actionable recommendations for all your various subscriptions.
1. Filter recommendations
You can apply filters to focus on specific subscriptions, resource groups, or resource types for targeted insights. Rather than clicking on All, select the subscriptions, resource types, or resource groups you want to view, then click outside of the button to apply changes.
2. Select a category
You can also select a category tile like Cost, Security, or Reliability on the Advisor dashboard to view relevant recommendations. This will display information about the recommendations for that category, including the percentage for overall score and total number of recommendations.
It will also display the specific number of recommendations per impact (i.e., high impact, medium impact, and low impact), as well as the number of resources impacted by the recommendation.
3. Review recommendations in detail
To review recommendations in detail, click on a specific recommendation, then click on Description or Impacted Resources. This will display more details, including the issue and its potential impact. For example, you can learn about the actions you can take to resolve the issue and/or take advantage of an opportunity.
4. Implement recommendations
To apply recommendations, simply click on the Recommended Actions link, which will direct you to a page where you can implement the suggested changes. In some cases, you may be referred to supporting documentation for additional guidance on implementation. If you’d like to understand a recommendation in greater detail before acting, use the “Learn More” option for further insights. Keep in mind that after applying a recommendation, Azure Advisor may take up to 24 hours to recognize the change and update its status.
5. Postpone or dismiss recommendations
If you don’t intend to take immediate action on a recommendation, Advisor lets you postpone it for later. You can also dismiss recommendations to keep your dashboard organized. Simply click on the checkbox to the left of the row, then click on Postpone or Dismiss.
6. Customize recommendations
You can also configure Azure Advisor to generate recommendations tailored to specific subscriptions or resource groups.
Go to Menu, then click on Configuration in the left pane. This displays a list of subscriptions. Click on the checkbox in the Include column for all the subscriptions or resource groups for which you want to receive recommendations, then select Apply.
Note: You might find that the checkbox is disabled, meaning you don’t have permission to make a configuration change.
Automatically Optimize Azure Costs With ProsperOps
With personalized recommendations, an integrated dashboard, step-by-step guidance, workload assessment, and proactive alerts, Azure Advisor is a powerful tool for optimizing your Azure costs and resources. For businesses looking to improve their Azure deployments, Advisor recommendations can be invaluable — but only if you act on them.
Uncertainty or prioritization dilemmas can cause hesitation, and in reality, implementing a recommendation is often just the first step. Continuous monitoring and follow-up are required to ensure long-term success, which can be challenging without dedicated processes in place.
That’s where ProsperOps can help. We take out the headache of manual processes and help you save money automatically with cloud savings-as-a-service.
With the Autonomous Discount Management platform, we help you optimize Microsoft Azure’s native discounts to reduce your cloud spend and place you in the 98th percentile of FinOps teams. Our platform setup is quick, and our systems work behind the scenes to optimize your cloud costs. This allows your teams to concentrate on innovation and growth while we automate cloud cost optimization for you.
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