A Quick Tour of the Microsoft Azure Advisor

Building an application on Azure while ensuring that the resources being properly, optimally used by that application is a challenging task. To curb this challenge, Microsoft has recently introduced a public preview of Azure Advisor.

This article provides a quick, high-level overview of Microsoft Azure Advisor (preview) with a practical example.

For novice cloud developers, aspiring cloud architects, pre-sales consultants, and all other IT professionals associated with cloud computing, especially with Microsoft Azure, this tutorial will explain the importance and capabilities of the Microsoft Azure Advisor.

Quick High-Level Overview

As defined, Azure Advisor is “a personalized recommendation engine that provides proactive best practices guidance for optimally configuring your Azure resources.”

Its capabilities to recommend and analyze resource configuration and usage telemetry for identifying any possible threats or risk makes Azure Advisor a solid mentor to rely on.

The best part is that it not only provides recommendations with respect to resources but also provides step-by-step guidance and walks you through implementing the fixes.

Prerequisites

1. Microsoft Azure account.

2. Access to at least one subscription.

3. Your role must be either Owner, Contributor, or Reader for the subscription

Let’s Start

There are three ways to open Azure Advisor Dashboard, for all you need to,

Go to the Microsoft Azure portal and log in with your Azure account credentials.

For the first, click ‘More Services’ => Type ‘Advisor’ at top text box => Azure Advisor

Or, click ‘More Services’ => Go to ‘Monitoring + Management’ => Azure Advisor

Or third, click on your subscription. (This appears only once).

Once you've performed any of the above steps, you will be redirected over to the Azure Advisor Dashboard,

Click on Get Started and you will see the below screen:

Your subscription will be listed under the Subscription dropdown. You can see the resources provisioned with the selected subscription be listed under the "Resource groups" dropdown.

Here, you can select all the resources listed or specific resources you want Azure Advisor to analyze, as shown in the image below.

Active or snoozed may be used for as a reminder for listed recommendations.

Click on the ‘Get recommendations’ button to allow Azure Advisor to analyze resources and providing recommendations. The recommendations are divided into four categories.

• High Availability – to ensure and improve the continuity of your applications.

• Security – to detect threats that could lead to potential security breaches.

• Performance – to enhance the speed of your applications.

• Cost – to optimize and reduce your overall Azure spending.

Any recommendations will be displayed as shown below.

Click on ‘Recommendations’ listed under the Resource section. Details of the recommendations will be displayed in another blade. Here, you can sort recommendations by description, resource, state, and severity.

You can also pin recommendations to the dashboard or just dismiss it from the list, as seen below:

Let’s try to implement one recommendation from the list. As mentioned earlier, it not only recommends but also guides you through a step-by-step process to implement them.

For this article, will select, ‘Provide security contact details’ with Medium severity. Click it to continue.

As you can see, it opens a window for providing security contact details as recommended.

Once you enter the required information, the "Recommendations" state updates to ‘In progress’ from ‘Open’ and will get resolved later.

Points to Remember

• Subscription owners and contributors can compute/generate recommendations. Reader roles, however, can only view Advisor recommendations.

• Recommendations are updated on an hourly basis.

• At the time of writing this article, Azure Advisor provides recommendations for virtual machines, availability sets, App Services, SQL servers, SQL databases, and Redis cache.

Conclusion or Summary

Azure Advisor is an intelligent mentor to analyze your resource configuration and utilization. And it’s really super easy to start working with it. With Azure Advisor, we not only get proactive, actionable, and personalized best practices recommendations but it also helps to improve the performance, security, and high availability of our resources while striving to reduce our Azure costs.

I'll be walking you through more about Azure Advisor in upcoming articles. Stay tuned!

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.

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Thank You! Happy Azure Coding!