Academmia

Azure Advisor

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Management and governance

Azure Advisor

Short Summary

Azure Advisor helps you optimize your Azure resources by analyzing your resource configuration and usage telemetry, then surfacing best-practice guidance. It groups guidance into five categories: Reliability, Security, Performance, Cost, and Operational Excellence. Advisor tells you what to improve; you still decide what to change and when.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

  • Define Azure Advisor and what kind of signals it uses to produce guidance.
  • Identify the five Azure Advisor recommendation categories.
  • Choose when Azure Advisor is the right tool versus Azure Monitor or Microsoft Cost Management.
  • Decide how to act on a recommendation (apply, postpone, or dismiss) based on real constraints.

Core Concepts

Azure Advisor is a digital cloud assistant that helps you follow best practices to optimize your Azure deployments. It looks at your resource configuration and usage telemetry, then provides actionable guidance to help you improve your environment.

Azure Advisor guidance is grouped into five categories:

  • Reliability: Improve continuity of business-critical apps (for example, resilience and availability patterns).
  • Security: Reduce common security risks (for example, missing protections or risky configurations).
  • Performance: Improve speed and responsiveness (for example, sizing choices that reduce bottlenecks).
  • Cost: Reduce unnecessary spend (for example, underutilized resources that can be resized or stopped).
  • Operational Excellence: Improve manageability and deployment practices (for example, consistency, workflow, and operational hygiene).

Two important boundaries to remember:

  • Advisor isn’t real-time monitoring. It doesn’t exist to alert you the moment something breaks. For live signals, alerting, and dashboards, you use Azure Monitor.
  • Advisor doesn’t change your resources by itself. It can show “recommended actions,” but you choose whether to implement them.

Practical expectation: Advisor runs in the background, and for newly created resources it can take up to 24 hours before recommendations show up.

Practical Understanding

Practical Situation 1: You want “tell me what to improve”

You’re responsible for a subscription and want a prioritized list of improvements to lower cost, tighten security, and remove obvious performance issues.

How to think about it: This is exactly what Azure Advisor is for: it summarizes best-practice improvements and groups them into the five categories so you can decide what to tackle next.

Common misunderstanding: “Advisor is only about cost.” Cost is one category, but Advisor also covers reliability, security, performance, and operational excellence.

Practical Situation 2: You need alerts, not advice

You want to know immediately when average Central Processing Unit (CPU) spikes, a service becomes unavailable, or error rates jump. You need dashboards and alerts.

How to think about it: That’s a monitoring and alerting need, so you use Azure Monitor (metrics/logs + alert rules). Advisor is about improvement guidance, not real-time alerting.

Common misunderstanding: “Advisor will alert me when something breaks.” Advisor focuses on best-practice optimization, while Azure Monitor is built for detecting live conditions and notifying you.

Practical Situation 3: Finance needs cost reporting and budgets

Finance asks where the spend is going, how it changes over time, and wants budgets/alerts to keep spending under control.

How to think about it: Use Microsoft Cost Management (cost analysis, reporting, budgets/alerts). You can still use Advisor’s Cost category for optimization ideas, but it’s not the same thing as cost reporting and budgeting.

Common misunderstanding: “Advisor replaces Cost Management.” Advisor can suggest cost-saving actions; Cost Management is the toolset for analyzing and controlling spend.

Practical Situation 4: A recommendation doesn’t fit your workload

Advisor suggests a change that would reduce cost, but you know it risks latency, availability, compliance requirements, or conflicts with a planned migration.

How to think about it: Treat Advisor as best-practice guidance, not a mandate. Apply what fits, and postpone or dismiss what doesn’t match your real constraints.

Common misunderstanding: “If Advisor says it, we must do it.” Recommendations are optional and should be applied only when they align with your goals and constraints.

Common Pitfalls

  • Mistake: Treating Azure Advisor like a monitoring/alerting system. Correction: Use Azure Monitor for real-time telemetry, dashboards, and alerts; use Advisor for improvement guidance.

  • Mistake: Assuming Advisor automatically fixes problems. Correction: Advisor proposes actions, but you decide whether and how to implement them.

  • Mistake: Expecting recommendations to appear immediately after creating resources or applying changes. Correction: Advisor runs in the background and can take time (up to ~24 hours) to surface or refresh recommendations.

  • Mistake: Confusing cost recommendations with cost management. Correction: Advisor’s Cost category suggests savings; Microsoft Cost Management is for analysis, reporting, budgets, and cost controls.

  • Mistake: Applying every recommendation without context. Correction: Validate impact against your workload requirements (availability, compliance, performance, and roadmap) before making changes.

Check Your Understanding

  • In one sentence, explain what Azure Advisor does without using the word “recommendation.”
  • List the five Azure Advisor categories and give one example of the type of improvement each category might suggest.
  • Describe one case where Azure Monitor is a better tool than Azure Advisor, and explain why.
  • Describe one case where Microsoft Cost Management is a better tool than Azure Advisor, and explain why.
  • Name one reason you might postpone or dismiss an Advisor recommendation even if it looks like a best practice.

Further Reading