Getting Started With Microsoft Azure Advisor

Introduction

Building an application on Azure while ensuring that the resources are being properly and optimally used, 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 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 of recommending and analyzing the resource configuration and usage telemetry for identifying any possible threats or risk, make Azure Advisor a solid mentor to rely on.

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

Prerequisites

1. Microsoft Azure account.
2. Access to at least one subscription.
3. Your role must either beOwner, Contributor, or Reader for the subscription.

Let’s Start

There are three ways to open Azure Advisor Dashboard, for all you need it to do. 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 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, 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, as a reminder for listed recommendations.



Click on the ‘Get recommendations’ button to allow Azure Advisor for analyzing 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 practice 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! Would advise to view the video Quick tour of Microsoft Azure Advisor (Preview) for much better understanding.

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below. Knowledge grows by sharing! Don't forget to share this article. If it helped you, it will also help many others too!

Thank You! Happy Azure Coding !!!