Ever wish someone looked at your Azure environment and said:
“Hey, you could save money here, improve security there, and avoid a future outage here”?
That’s exactly what Azure Advisor does – for free.
It’s like a smart audit assistant that reviews your resources and gives personalized best practice recommendations across key areas.
🔍 What Is Azure Advisor?
Azure Advisor analyzes your deployed resources and provides recommendations based on:
- Microsoft best practices
- Real-time telemetry
- Your usage patterns
It’s available right in the portal:
🧭 Azure Portal → Azure Advisor
🧩 The 5 Key Recommendation Blades (Categories)
Let’s look at each Advisor blade, what it covers, and when it’s useful:
💰 1. Cost (Cost Optimization)
Use When:
- You want to reduce your Azure bill
- You’re underutilizing VMs or unused disks
- You forgot to shut down dev/test resources
Scenarios Solved:
- Resize or shut down underutilized VMs
- Right-size SKUs for compute and databases
- Delete unattached disks or idle NICs
- Use Reserved Instances for consistent workloads
✅ Saves real money.
🧠 Especially powerful when combined with Azure Cost Management.
🛡️ 2. Security
Use When:
- You want to harden your environment
- You’re preparing for audit or ISO/SOC compliance
- You’re enforcing defense-in-depth
Scenarios Solved:
- Enable MFA for all users
- Use secure network configurations (NSGs, Just-in-Time VM access)
- Patch VMs with missing critical updates
- Protect storage accounts with firewalls + TLS
✅ Security recommendations are powered by Microsoft Defender for Cloud
⚡ 3. Performance
Use When:
- Your app is slow, even in the cloud
- You’re hitting IOPS/throughput bottlenecks
- Your web app or DB isn’t scaling well
Scenarios Solved:
- Upgrade to faster SKUs
- Move resources to appropriate availability zones/regions
- Add autoscaling to App Services or VMs
- Optimize disk types (Standard → Premium SSD)
✅ Helps get more performance out of existing setups.
🎯 4. Reliability (High Availability)
Use When:
- You want to avoid downtime
- You’re setting up HA/DR for production workloads
- You’re preparing for availability SLA requirements
Scenarios Solved:
- Set up VM Availability Sets or Zones
- Replicate VMs with Azure Site Recovery
- Configure geo-redundancy for storage accounts
- Use Azure Load Balancers for failover
✅ Essential for mission-critical apps.
📏 5. Operational Excellence
Use When:
- You want better governance, monitoring, or consistency
- You’re scaling DevOps practices
- You’re building long-term maintainable infra
Scenarios Solved:
- Standardize tagging for resources
- Enable diagnostics and logging
- Implement policies via Azure Policy
- Use Azure Blueprints for consistent environments
✅ Think of it as DevOps hygiene and architectural sanity checks.
📊 Where to View These in the Portal
🧭 Azure Portal → Azure Advisor →
Each recommendation is grouped under one of the 5 blades above.
You can also:
- Filter by subscription, service, impact
- Export recommendations (CSV, Excel)
- Open in Log Analytics or use Advisor Score (preview)
🧠 AZ-104 Nuggets
- ✅ Azure Advisor is free and works per subscription
- ✅ Doesn’t auto-apply changes – you decide what to fix
- ✅ Recommendations update every 24 hours
- ✅ Security blade = powered by Defender for Cloud
- ✅ Use Advisor Score to track optimization over time
🏁 TL;DR – What Blade Solves What?
| Blade | Use It For |
|---|---|
| Cost | Kill waste, right-size, shut down unused |
| Security | MFA, patches, firewalls, Defender |
| Performance | Disk, IOPS, CPU bottlenecks |
| Reliability | HA, ASR, redundancy, load balancing |
| Operational Excellence | Tagging, logs, policy, DevOps hygiene |
“Azure Advisor is like the coach who gives you game-changing tips – but never forces you to take them. The smart ones listen.” 😄
Until the next recommendation hits your dashboard,
Cya & keep optimizing smart 🚀
BrontoWise 
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