What is Azure Advisor?

Are you looking to optimize your Azure environment? In this post, I’ll tell you about Azure Advisor and how it can help you to do that.

Microsoft defines Azure Advisor as a personalized cloud consultant that helps you follow best practices and optimize your Azure deployments. It analyzes your resources configuration and usage telemetry, then recommends solutions based on that data.

Azure Advisor gives recommendations on how to enhance your Azure experience in 4 distinct ways:

1. High Availability - helps ensure and improve the continuity of your business-critical applications.
2. Security - detect threats and vulnerabilities that might lead to potential security breaches.
3. Performance – to increase the speed of your applications.
4. Cost – optimize and reduce your overall Azure spend.

Even better news – these recommendations are no additional cost to you and provide actionable results, in many cases with step by step instructions, as well as links to implement the suggestion.

Azure Advisor runs separately on each subscription in your Azure environment. It can be fine tuned to focus on specific subscriptions or resource groups while ignoring others. To access the Advisor the user can be owner, contributor or reader to the subscription.

You can find the Advisor in the Azure portal by clicking on All Services and scrolling to the Azure Advisor or by searching for it in the search bar. The Advisor currently provides recommendations to several Azure resources: SQL Servers, Virtual Machines, app services, availability sets, application gateways and Azure cache, and more are being added all the time.

Once a recommendation has been logged, administrators have 3 options for remediation in the Azure Portal:

1. Implement the change. Modification is easy as the Advisor guides you through the implementation for each recommendation.
2. Postpone the recommendation. If now is not the right time to implement changes, recommendations can be postponed for a specific time period.
3. Remove the recommendation. The Advisor is focusing on best practices and recommendations that work for most organizations, but not for all, so if it’s not best for your organization, you can remove it altogether.

So, think of Azure Advisor as your personalized cloud consultant to help you optimize your Azure environment. With easy to follow guides for implementation of recommendations that are based on your data, as well as choosing how or if you want to implement them, the Advisor is a great thing to have in your toolbox.

If you’d like to learn more about Azure Advisor or anything Azure related, you’re in the right place. Click the link below or contact us—our Azure experts are here to help, no matter where you are in your Azure journey.