Although Azure Advisor has been around for quite some time, it remains relatively unknown to many. Let’s take a closer look at this powerful tool.
What is Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor provides you with a one stop high level overview of your Azure environment. It provides actionable recommendations across critical dimensions, helping you optimize your resources.
Areas Covered:
- Cost
- Advisor analyzes your resource usage and suggests ways to reduce costs.
- It identifies underutilized resources, recommends rightsizing, and highlights opportunities for reserved instances.
- Security
- Advisor focuses on security hardening.
- It detects vulnerabilities and recommends actions related to network security groups, identity management, and data encryption.
- Reliability
- Ensuring high availability and fault tolerance is crucial.
- Advisor suggests strategies to improve redundancy, load balancing, and disaster recovery.
- Operational Excellence
- Advisor ensures efficient resource management.
- It provides best practices for tagging, automation, and monitoring.
- Performance
- It recommends ways to tune configurations, optimize queries, and scale resources.
Scoring and Recommendations
- Microsoft gives each section a score.
- Score and the recommendations are separate. You might have a perfect score in one section but still get some suggestions.
- For example, recommendations under “Reliability” take into account things like security, saving money, and operational excellence.
When you click on the recommendations, you’ll be presented with the following:
- Impact
- This section outlines the severity or impact of the recommendation.
- It helps you understand how critical the suggested action is for your environment.
- Impact levels typically include:
- High: Urgent actions needed to prevent major issues.
- Medium: Important improvements that enhance efficiency.
- Low: Minor adjustments with potential benefits.
- Description
- Here, you’ll find a detailed explanation of the recommendation.
- Understand why the specific action is recommended and how it affects your resources.
- The description often includes technical insights and best practices.
- Potential Benefits
- This section highlights the advantages of implementing the recommendation.
- It answers the question: “What do I gain by following this advice?”
- Benefits may include cost savings, improved performance, better security, or streamlined operations.
- Impacted Resources
- Advisor specifies the affected Azure resources related to the recommendation.
- You’ll see a list of resources (e.g., virtual machines, databases, storage accounts) that benefit from the proposed action.
- Understanding which resources are impacted helps you prioritize and plan your changes.
Summary
Azure Advisor is like a secret weapon—it’s your go-to spot for getting awesome tips and tricks to supercharge your Azure setup. Seriously, every Azure admin should bookmark this gem and keep it handy on their dashboard.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/advisor
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/advisor/advisor-overview
Alan Curtis 