Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor is a free, personalised cloud consultant built into the Azure portal. It continuously analyses your deployed resources and provides actionable recommendations to improve cost, reliability, security, performance, and operational excellence. Unlike the Well-Architected Review (which is a questionnaire), Advisor reads your actual resource configuration and metrics to identify specific issues in your environment.

Azure Advisor organises its recommendations into five categories that map directly to the WAF pillars:

• Cost — eliminate waste and reduce spending
• Reliability — improve uptime and fault tolerance
• Security — remediate vulnerabilities and misconfigurations
• Performance — improve throughput and latency
• Operational Excellence — improve deployment and monitoring practices

To open Azure Advisor, search for 'Advisor' in the Azure portal search bar. The Advisor dashboard shows a summary score for each category and a list of recommendations sorted by impact. You can filter by subscription, resource group, or resource type to focus on a specific area. The Advisor score is a percentage from 0 to 100 showing your overall adherence to best practices.

Advisor's cost recommendations identify opportunities like right-sizing or shutting down underutilised VMs, purchasing Reserved Instances for consistently running resources, deleting unattached managed disks, and removing idle App Service plans. Each recommendation shows the estimated monthly savings, giving you a business case to present to stakeholders before making changes.

Reliability recommendations flag workloads that lack redundancy or backup. Common examples include VMs not protected by Azure Backup, single-instance VMs not in an availability set or zone, and databases without geo-replication enabled. Addressing these recommendations directly reduces the risk of data loss or extended downtime during an outage.

Security recommendations from Advisor are sourced from Microsoft Defender for Cloud and cover issues such as missing disk encryption, storage accounts allowing public access, open management ports (RDP/SSH) exposed to the internet, and missing multi-factor authentication. Resolving these recommendations directly improves your Secure Score in Defender for Cloud.

Performance recommendations identify bottlenecks and misconfigurations that slow your workloads. Examples include using Premium SSD instead of Standard HDD for I/O-intensive workloads, enabling read replicas for heavily queried databases, and configuring Azure CDN to cache static content closer to users. Each recommendation links to the specific resource and the steps to implement the fix.

Operational excellence recommendations cover practices that help teams operate more reliably. They may suggest enabling diagnostic settings to stream logs to a Log Analytics workspace, configuring resource health alerts, or ensuring resources are tagged for cost allocation. These recommendations are often lower severity but have a compounding positive effect on overall operations.

Not every Advisor recommendation is appropriate for every environment. You can postpone a recommendation to a future date (e.g., after a scheduled migration) or dismiss it if it is not relevant to your context. Dismissed recommendations no longer affect your score. You can view dismissed recommendations at any time and restore them if your situation changes.

You can configure Advisor alerts to receive notifications when new recommendations appear in a specific category. For example, you might set up an alert to notify your security team whenever a new high-severity security recommendation is detected. Advisor also supports a weekly digest email that summarises the top recommendations across your subscriptions.

The Advisor score can be included in governance dashboards to track the health of your Azure environment over time. Many organisations set minimum Advisor score thresholds as part of their cloud governance policy — for example, requiring a security score above 80% before a workload can go to production. The score is visible across multiple subscriptions via management groups.

Test your understanding of Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) concepts from this lesson.

In this lesson you learned: Azure Advisor is a free tool that analyses your deployed resources and provides recommendations across five categories; cost recommendations show estimated savings with right-sizing and Reserved Instances; and you can postpone or dismiss recommendations that are not applicable. Next up we explore how to apply WAF patterns to real-world architectures.