What is Azure Advisor?

Struggling to control Azure costs or improve your cloud performance? Azure Advisor gives you personalised cost optimisation, security, performance, and reliability recommendations based on Microsoft’s best practices. It’s a quick way to fine-tune your Azure environment and get more value from every resource you run.

In this guide, we will walk through everything you need to know about this amazing Azure tool. Let’s get started.

• What is Azure Advisor?
• Features of Azure Advisor
• Working of Azure Advisor
• Azure Advisor Pricing
• Benefits of Azure Advisor
• Use Cases of Azure Advisor
• Conclusion

What is Azure Advisor?

At its core, Azure Advisor is a built-in cloud optimisation tool. It analyses your Azure setup and tells you exactly where you can save money, improve performance, strengthen security, and increase reliability. Think of it as a smart checklist that updates itself based on how your workloads actually behave.

To make it easy to understand, here’s a quick breakdown:

• AI-driven recommendations based on Azure best practices
• Covers five key areas: Cost, Security, Performance, Reliability, and Operational Excellence
• Continuous assessment of your resources, configurations, and usage
• Actionable guidance and not just alerts, so you know what to fix and how
• Fully integrated with Azure Monitor, Azure Defender, and Cost Management

In short, Azure Advisor helps you run a cleaner, more efficient, and cost-effective cloud environment without guesswork.

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Features of Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor comes with a set of built-in capabilities that help you improve cost, security, performance, and reliability across your Azure environment. Here are the core features explained simply:

Personalized Recommendations

Azure Advisor analyses real usage patterns and generates recommendations tailored to your workloads, not generic suggestions.
You will get insights across:

• Cost optimization
• Security improvements
• Performance tuning
• High availability
• Operational excellence

Integration with Azure Services

Azure Advisor works seamlessly with services like:

• Azure Virtual Machines
• Storage Accounts
• SQL Database
• App Services
• Kubernetes Services

This gives you service-specific recommendations that are far more accurate than a general cloud health check.

Continuous Monitoring

Instead of waiting for problems, Azure Advisor keeps checking your resources in the background.
This means you get proactive alerts before issues turn into downtime or excessive cloud bills.

Security Recommendations

Advisor taps into Azure Defender to provide guidance on:

• Identity and access controls
• Network security gaps
• Encryption
• Vulnerability mitigation

This helps strengthen your security posture without manually combing through settings.

Cost Optimisation Recommendations

Azure Advisor highlights where you are overspending and recommends:

• Resizing VMs
• Shutting down idle resources
• Switching to reserved instances
• Cleaning unused disks or snapshots

These recommendations often result in quick, measurable Azure cost savings.

Working of Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor follows a simple but powerful workflow to help you optimise your Azure environment. Here’s how it works, step by step:

1. Data Collection

Azure Advisor starts by gathering detailed information about your resources,  configuration settings, usage trends, performance metrics, and security posture. This gives the tool a complete picture of how your Azure services are behaving.

2. Analysis

Using this data, the tool evaluates where improvements can be made. It checks for issues related to cost, security, performance, operational excellence, and high availability, comparing your setup with Microsoft’s best practices.

3. Personalised Recommendations 

Once the analysis is complete, Azure Advisor generates tailored suggestions for each resource. These aren’t generic tips; they are workload-specific recommendations based on your actual usage patterns.

4. Insights and Impact Overview

For every recommendation, Azure Advisor also shows the expected impact, such as:

• Estimated cost savings
• Performance boosts
• Security improvements
• Availability enhancements

This helps you prioritise what to fix first.

5. Implementation Support

Azure Advisor doesn’t just tell you what to do. It helps you do it.

You get:

• Quick actions inside the portal
• Scripts or templates for complex changes
• Guidance on best-practice implementation

This ensures recommendations are applied correctly and consistently.

Azure Advisor Pricing

Azure Advisor is free for all Azure users. You get recommendations for cost optimisation, security, performance, and reliability at no additional charge.

Only organisations that need cross-subscription visibility or large-scale governance may require the Azure Advisor Enterprise tier.

In simple terms:

• Advanced multi-subscription management: Enterprise tier
• Core features: Free

Benefits of Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor helps you get more value from your Azure environment by offering smart, data-driven recommendations. Here are the key benefits:

Use Cases of Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor recommendations offer personalised insights to optimise Azure resources, making it beneficial for businesses of all sizes. Given below are some use cases of Azure Advisor:

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Conclusion

Azure Advisor helps businesses optimise Azure resources, cut costs, boost performance, and improve security with personalised recommendations. It’s an essential tool for smarter cloud management.

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Frequently Asked Questions