Microsoft Azure – Using Azure Advisor

In the given article we will learn how to make the most of your Azure account using Azure Advisor. In the article, we are going to look into Azure Advisor, which is a service that provides best practice recommendations that are personalized to your environment and your resources to help you better optimize your Azure deployments. So to do that, Azure look at your configuration telemetry and usage patterns, and Azure tells you to think about what you can do to optimize.

Navigation to Azure Advisor:

So, to get started by finding Azure Advisor. You can look over on the left navigation of your portal and by default, it will be there. It’s a little cloud with a ribbon. If you have removed it for some reason, you didn’t know what it was, you can also go up to the top and search for Advisor. And from there, you can click in.

Using Azure Advisor:

This will start to load your dashboard of recommendations. So here, you will see that Azure has four categories of recommendations for you. Azure has high availability. Next, Azure has security, performance, and cost. And looking into these tiles, you will see a quick summary of what’s beneath. For example, you will see you have nine recommendations impacting 164 resources. And you can see the breakdown of impact in high, medium, and low.

Next, if you kind of look over at security, you will point out that this is a single one-stop-shop for recommendations. So, these are actually being pulled from Azure Security Center, so you don’t have to go to two places to see your recommendations; it’s all here within Advisor.

Next, you see the performance tile. And here, you just see a checkmark because you are actually compliant with all of the performance recommendations that Azure has for your resources.

And last, you will see the cost tile. Azure actually shows you the amount of money that you can save by following these recommendations.

So, you are going to go back over to high availability and drill in. And here, once you drill into this tile, you will see the list of all of the best practices that you are not following.

So, let’s look through one of these. For example, you have some virtual machines here that aren’t using VM backup. So if you click on that recommendation, it will load for you the list of all of those resources in your environment and you can scan through and decide which ones of these are production resources are things that you care about setting up backup for.

And for those, you can click on the recommended action link directly inline right here, and it will open the experience for you to actually take that action and follow the best practices.

In Advisor you can go back over to your overview tab, and you can actually download these recommendations and share them with other people in your organization. So, at the top, Azure has download as CSV and it has download as PDF.

And you can click on that and it will download for you a summary that you can then share with other people in your organization and they can follow up to take the appropriate actions.