Azure’s Advisor is a no-cost, centralized, personalized service giving best practice recommendations for optimizations in 4 categories, for Azure deployments in all of your Azure subscriptions.
Advisor analyzes your resource configuration and usage telemetry and then recommends solutions that can help you improve the cost effectiveness, performance, high availability, and security of your Azure resources.
With Advisor, you can:
- Get proactive, actionable, and personalized best practices recommendations.
- Improve the performance, security, and high availability of your resources, as you identify opportunities to reduce your overall Azure spend.
- Get recommendations with proposed actions inline. – Azure Advisor Documentation
The 4 categories of optimization recommendations are :
- High Availability
- Security
- Performance
- Cost
To access Advisor on your Azure Subscription > Portal > More Services > Advisor > Select Subscription. The example subscription below has 2 High Availability, Medium Impact recommendations, and 1 High Impact Security recommendation:
Opening the All Types dropdown list reveals the extensive default list of resources that Advisor is collecting telemetry data from to compile its optimization recommendations. Note that this list of resources can also be filtered:
Drilling into the High Availability recommendations in this subscription show that there are 2 ‘Medium’ impact recommendations, that effect 6 Virtual Machines:
Selecting the 4 virtual machines link in the Resource category, provides a list of the vms needing backup enabled, as well as the Activation option to Snooze the specific recommendation for a resource:
The recommendations on each screen/blade, can also be downloaded as a CSV or PDF:
Selecting the Security recommendation reveals a High Impact Security optimization:
Selecting the 10 Recommendations link reveals the detailed list of High and Medium Impact recommendations for this subscription – entailing security fixes for web apps, network settings, storage accounts, and vms:
Drilling down to any specific item on the list > Enable encryption for Azure Storage Account > will open sequential blades to be able to make the changes suggested:
For an IT professional, Azure’s Advisor is an excellent provider of ‘best practice’ directives for ease of implementation and inline documentation guidance.
Additional Resources to Learn About Azure’s Advisor:
Azure Advisor – your personalized guide to optimal resource configuration- Azure Advisor Documentation