Azure Advisor is a built-in Azure service that provides personalized recommendations to help optimize your cloud environment. It's a free feature available in Microsoft Azure that keeps an eye on how you're using your resources. Then, it provides tailored advice to help you get better performance, trim unnecessary spending, enhance your security, and make your Azure services more dependable.
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Table of content
Core Pillars of Azure Advisor
Recommendations under Azure Advisor are grouped under five themes, each targeting a key part of your cloud environment:
| Core Pillars | Description |
| Cost Optimization | Detects underused resources to help reduce spending |
| Security | Offers guidance to make your setup more secure |
| Operational Excellence | Suggests ways to improve workflows and deployment consistency |
| High Availability | Helps ensure systems stay up and running smoothly |
How Azure Advisor Works
Azure Advisor keeps track of how your cloud resources are configured and how they’re being used. Based on this, it offers tailored suggestions that aim to improve performance, efficiency, cloud cost savings, and security. The tool regularly monitors changes to ensure its advice reflects current usage.
How Often Recommendations Are Updated
Updates are usually made each week, keeping recommendations current with your latest resource usage. You can also refresh manually for immediate feedback after making changes.
Integration Options
You can access Azure Advisor through:
- Azure Portal: Web-based access for hands-on use.
- Azure CLI : Command-line interaction for scripting and automation.
- Advisor API: Enables use in custom tools or dashboards.
Benefits of Using Azure Advisor
- Cost Savings: Advisor identifies resources that aren’t being fully utilized, helping you reduce unnecessary cloud expenses.
- Improved Security: It highlights security issues and offers best practice recommendations to strengthen your environment’s protection.
- Better Performance: You’ll get suggestions to fine-tune your infrastructure for faster, more efficient application performance.
- Increased Reliability: Advisor helps you build more resilient systems by recommending ways to improve uptime and fault tolerance.
- Operational Efficiency: It encourages practices that streamline processes, enhance deployments, and reduce manual overhead.
- Personalized Recommendations: Insights are tailored to your actual resource usage, making them more relevant and actionable.
- Easy Access & Integration: You can use Azure Advisor through the portal, command-line tools, or APIs—whichever fits your workflow best.
Limitations of Azure Advisor
- No multi-cloud support: Only works within Azure; doesn’t provide insights across other cloud providers.
- Actionable Insights, not Automation: Provides suggestions but requires manual implementation, no automatic fixes.
- Focus on Best Practices: Recommendations are based on general best practices and may not cover edge-case or specialized configurations.
- Limited Visibility in Cost Scope: May not identify all cost factors in complex setups like multi-subscription environments.
- Not Real-Time: May not identify all cost factors in complex setups like multi-subscription environments.
- Generalised Recommendations: Some advice may be too broad or not fully tailored to your specific business needs.
Best Practices for Setting Up Advisor Alerts
- Start with What Matters Most: Focus on a few high-priority recommendations that align with your business goals. For instance, if cost reduction is key, track alerts for underutilized virtual machines. You can always expand or adjust alerts later.
- Choose the Right Audience and Method: Send alerts to the teams or individuals who can act on them. Email is a simple and non-intrusive way to start. As needs evolve, you can fine-tune your notification settings.
- Automate When You’re Ready: After getting comfortable with alerts, explore automation. You could direct recommendations to your ticketing system or even trigger automated scripts (runbooks) to handle fixes without manual input.
Azure Advisor FAQ’s
- Q1. Where is Azure Advisor available?
Azure Advisor is offered in every Azure region globally. - Q2. How does Azure Advisor help with cost optimization?
It spots idle or underused resources—like VMs or storage—to suggest cost-saving actions. - Q3. What integration options does Azure Advisor offer?
You can access Advisor via the Azure Portal, the Azure CLI, or its REST API. - Q4. How does Azure Advisor help with Azure performance?
Advisor provides performance recommendations, such as resizing overutilized VMs, to boost speed and responsiveness. - Q5. What happens if I ignore Azure Advisor recommendations?
Potential risks related to cost, security, performance, etc., but no forced action.
How CloudKeeper Can Enhance Azure Advisor?
- Enhanced Cost Optimization: CloudKeeper helps identify and prioritize Azure Advisor recommendations with the highest savings potential, ensuring efficient budget use.
- Automation Support: It complements Advisor by automating repetitive actions and reducing manual effort in implementing recommendations.
- Advanced Visibility: Offers a unified view across various Azure subscriptions, resource groups, and tags, a capability not available in Azure Advisor.
- Forecasting & Reporting: CloudKeeper adds deeper analytics, enabling better cost forecasting and generating detailed, business-ready reports.
- Seamless DevOps Integration: Integrates Azure cost insights into your DevOps pipeline, supporting continuous optimization during deployment cycles.
