How to Use Azure Advisor to Identify Cost-Saving Opportunities

Azure Advisor is a brilliant free tool built in to Azure which provides suggestions for optimizing your environment. By analyzing your resource usage and configuration, Advisor can suggest actions that help you reduce costs, improve security, enhance performance, and ensure reliability.

In this post, I’ll focus on how to use Advisor to identify and implement cost-saving opportunities, helping you optimize your cloud spending without compromising on performance.

This post is part of my Azure Cost-Saving Series. For more tips on reducing your Azure costs, check out the full series here: Sysadmin Central – Cost Saving Series.

What is Azure Advisor?

Advisor is a “digital cloud assistant” built into the Azure platform. It analyzes your resource configurations and usage data to provide personalized recommendations across five key categories:

Cost: Identifies opportunities to reduce your spending.
Security: Suggests actions to strengthen the security of your environment by identifying threats and vulnerabilities.
Reliability: Recommends ways to improve the availability of your applications.
Operational Excellence: Offers advice on optimizing your operational processes and deployment best practice.
Performance: Helps you enhance the performance of your workloads.

For this post, the focus will be on the Cost category.

Accessing Advisor

Advisor is easily accessible from the Azure Portal, and it provides a centralized location to view and act on recommendations for your entire environment.

Step 1: Log in to the Azure Portal
Start by signing in to the Azure Portal.

Step 2: Navigate to Advisor
You can access Advisor by typing “Advisor” in the search bar at the top of the portal or by finding it under the “Monitor” section in the left-hand menu of individual resources.

Step 3: Advisor Dashboard
The dashboard is divided into the five categories mentioned earlier. For cost optimization, click on the “Cost” tab. This will display all cost-related recommendations, such as resizing underutilized resources, purchasing Reserved Instances, and optimizing storage costs.

Reviewing Cost Recommendations

The Advisor presents recommendations that can help you reduce your cloud spend. Here are some common types of recommendations you might see:

Right-sizing or Shutting Down Underutilized VMs
Advisor often recommends resizing or shutting down VMs that are underutilized. By analyzing your VM’s CPU and memory usage, Advisor can suggest a smaller, more cost-effective VM size or recommend deallocating VMs that are consistently idle.

Be careful when choosing to take actions based solely on these recommendations as it can only base recommendations on system data, not on business context.

Purchasing Reserved Instances
If you have resources running consistently, such as production VMs or SQL Databases, Advisor may recommend purchasing Reserved Instances. Reserved Instances allow you to prepay for one or three year periods, significantly reducing costs compared to pay-as-you-go pricing as described in my previous post.

Optimizing Storage Costs
Advisor can help you identify storage accounts or databases that could be downsized or better managed to save costs. For example, it might suggest moving infrequently accessed data to a lower-cost storage tier or deleting unused storage resources.

You have disks that haven’t been attached to a VM for more than 30 days. Evaluate if you still need the disk.

Advisor can identify managed disks which may be sitting unattached to a VM, costing money whilst providing no benefit.

Other

There is a very large list of potential recommendations, for a full list, have a look at the official documentation – Cost recommendations – Azure Advisor | Microsoft Learn

Implementing Recommendations

Once you’ve reviewed the recommendations, the next step is implementing them.

Step 1: Apply Recommendations from Advisor
Advisor often allows you to take action directly from the interface. For example, if it suggests resizing a VM, you can click through the recommendation to initiate the resizing process. Similarly, if it recommends purchasing Reserved Instances, you can follow the provided link to start the reservation process.

Step 2: Customizing Recommendations
You can adjust the commitment lengths and look-back period to adjust what will be recommended. You can also dismiss individual recommendation to remove them if they don’t apply to your environment for whatever reason.

Step 3: Track Progress and Review Impact
After implementing the recommendations, use Azure Cost Management + Billing to track the impact of the changes.

Ongoing Cost Optimization

Advisor is a powerful tool, but its true value comes from regular use.

Regularly Review Recommendations
Make it a habit to check Advisor at least once a month. Regular reviews ensure you’re consistently optimizing your environment and not missing out on new cost-saving opportunities, including additional functionality which occasionally gets added.

Set Up Alerts for New Recommendations
You can set up alerts to notify you when new recommendations are available in Advisor directly from the Recommendations tabs. This proactive approach ensures you’re always aware of potential optimizations.

Set up Recommendation Digests

You can also configure recommendation digests via the Advisor portal, which allows you to configure periodic notifications like email, sms or anything else supported by action groups. A full guide to configuring them may be found here – Recommendation digest for Azure Advisor – Azure Advisor | Microsoft Learn

Conclusion

Using Advisor is a brilliant way to identify cost-saving opportunities in your environment. By regularly reviewing and implementing its recommendations, you can maximise your cost savings.

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