Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor is a free, personalised recommendation engine built into the Azure portal. It analyses your deployed resources and usage patterns, then provides actionable guidance to help you improve your Azure environment across all five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework.
What Azure Advisor Does
Azure Advisor continuously evaluates your Azure resources against Microsoft's best practices. It does not just tell you what is wrong — it tells you what to do about it and often provides a direct link to take action.
Think of Advisor as a built-in consultant that reviews your environment 24/7 and flags opportunities for improvement. It analyses resource configuration, usage telemetry, and patterns across millions of Azure deployments to generate relevant recommendations.
The Five Categories
Azure Advisor organises its recommendations into five categories that align directly with the Well-Architected Framework pillars:
1. Reliability
Advisor identifies configuration issues that could affect the availability of your workloads:
- Enable diagnostics logging — Advisor detects resources without diagnostic settings and recommends enabling them
- Add zone redundancy — identifies single-zone deployments that would benefit from Availability Zone redundancy
- Configure backups — flags VMs and databases without backup policies
- Use Traffic Manager or Front Door — recommends multi-region traffic routing for critical applications
- Enable soft delete on Key Vault — prevents accidental secret deletion
2. Security
Security recommendations come from Microsoft Defender for Cloud and appear in Advisor as well:
- Enable MFA for all users
- Apply missing NSG rules to restrict unnecessary network access
- Enable encryption on resources where it is not configured
- Remediate vulnerabilities detected by Defender for Cloud
- Enable just-in-time VM access to reduce attack surface
3. Cost
Advisor analyses resource utilisation to find cost-saving opportunities:
- Right-size or shut down underutilised VMs — identifies VMs with consistently low CPU and memory usage
- Purchase Reserved Instances — recommends reservations based on your usage patterns (with estimated savings)
- Delete unused resources — identifies unattached disks, unused public IPs, empty App Service plans
- Use Spot VMs — suggests Spot pricing for suitable workloads
- Optimise storage tiers — recommends moving data to cheaper access tiers
4. Operational Excellence
Advisor provides recommendations for improving your operational practices:
- Fix service health alerts — ensure you are notified about Azure service issues
- Update expiring certificates — flags certificates approaching expiration
- Enable resource locks — recommends locks on critical resources to prevent accidental deletion
- Tag resources — identifies untagged resources that make cost tracking and management difficult
- Upgrade deprecated services — flags resources using deprecated SKUs or API versions
5. Performance
Advisor identifies performance bottlenecks and optimisation opportunities:
- Upgrade to Premium SSD — recommends Premium storage for I/O-intensive workloads
- Enable caching — suggests Azure Cache for Redis or CDN for frequently accessed data
- Increase DTU or vCore allocation — identifies databases hitting performance limits
- Use connection pooling — recommends pooling for database connections
- Scale out App Service plans — flags plans that are consistently at capacity
Using Azure Advisor
Accessing Advisor