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Introduction
Azure Advisor is your personalized cloud service for Azure best practices that helps us to improve availability, enhance protection, optimize the performance of our Azure resources, and maximize the return on our IT budget. In this article, we will learn about Azure Advisor in detail.
Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor is a new Microsoft Azure service that provides personalized recommendations based on our configuration for Azure services. It uses five pillars of the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework as a base that helps us to improve Azure configuration. By using Azure Advisor recommendations, we can improve and adjust the cost of our Azure services, security, reliability, efficiency, and performance.
Microsoft Azure's well-designed framework provides a logical way to optimize cloud-based workloads using a five-pillar approach. Let's take a look at each pillar and how they work together. In this article, we will learn about Azure Advisor in detail.
Azure Advisor in Business
Essentially, Azure Advisor takes the guesswork out of optimizing our Azure deployments.
It provides our business with highly-personalized recommendations and best practices that are both actionable and proactive;
It helps us to find ways that reduce costs related to our Azure service subscriptions; and
It improves the performance, security, and availability of resources we use.
Kinds of Recommendations provided by Advisor:
Advisor recommendations are of 4 basic kinds:
High availability
Security
Performance
Cost
High Availability Recommendations
High Availability Recommendations ensure the continuity of our business-critical applications. Specifically, Advisor will:
Identify virtual machines not part of an availability set and recommend moving them to an availability set: To ensure redundancy and that at least one virtual machine is available during planned or unplanned maintenance events and outages, Advisor will recommend that we need to include two or more virtual machines in each availability set.
Identify application gateway instances that are not configured for fault tolerance: this ensures the business continuity of critical applications not powered by application gateways and that our application gateway instances are configured with regard to service level agreement (SLA) requirements.
Improve the performance of virtual machine disks: Advisor will identify virtual machines associated with standard disks and recommend upgrading them to premium disks. This will ensure high-performance, low-latency disk support for virtual machines that run I/O-intensive workloads.
Prevent accidental deletion of virtual machine data: specifically, Advisor will identify any virtual machines in which backup is not enabled and recommend enabling backup. This ensures that critical data will be available and protects us from corruption or accidental deletion of these data.
Security Recommendations
Advisor integrates with the Azure Security Center to provide critical security recommendations, helping us prevent, detect and respond to security threats. It will periodically analyze the security of all Azure resources and make recommendations that help us implement whatever controls we need.
Performance Recommendations
Performance recommendations are designed to improve the speed and responsiveness of business-critical applications. Specifically, Advisor will:
Improve database performance: Advisor integrates with SQL Database Advisor. It will assess the performance of the database by analyzing our usage history and make recommendations to optimize running the typical database workload.
Improve Redis Cache performance: Advisor will find Redis Cache instances in which performance is negatively affected because of server load, network bandwidth, or high memory usage and make recommendations to prevent potential problems.
Improve App Service performance: Advisor will identify circumstances in which memory or CPU are exhausted by app runtimes and those in which the collocation of resources can boost performance and reduce costs. Advisor will make appropriate recommendations for improvement.
Cost Recommendations
An advisor can find underutilized resources to help reduce the overall cost of our Azure services. Advisor will:
Help us reduce virtual machine costs: specifically, Advisor will monitor our virtual machine usage over 14 days and designate any virtual machines whose CPU utilization is 5% or less and whose network usage is 7 MB or less for at least four days as “low-utilization.” It will then display an estimated cost for continuing to run those virtual machines, providing us with the information we need to decide if we want to shut them down or resize them.
Identify cost-effective solutions for managing multiple SQL databases: Advisor will find SQL server instances that can benefit from the creation of elastic database pools. This provides cost-effective solutions for managing the performance goals of databases that have different usage patterns.
How to Get Started with Advisor
To Get Started with Advisor we’ll need to understand how to (1) access recommendations; (2) implement recommendations; (3)n search for recommendations; and (4) “snooze” or dismiss recommendations:
How to Access Advisor Recommendations;
After subscribing to Advisor, we (as subscription owners) need to register a subscription by launching the Advisor dashboard and clicking on the “get recommendations” button. After this one-time operation is completed, we can access recommendations as owners, contributors, or readers.
After we sign into the Azure portal, click on “more services” in the left pane. In the service menu pane, we’ll see “monitoring and management.” Click on “Azure Advisor” to display the Advisor dashboard. Then choose the Azure subscription for which we want recommendations. We can then select the kind of recommendations we want, for example, high availability, security, performance, or cost.
Recommendations are presented with either inline actions or links to documentation. When we click on an inline action recommendation, Advisor will present a “guided user journey” which outlines the steps necessary to implement that recommendation. When we click on a documentation link, Advisor will display documentation that explains how we can manually implement the necessary action.
How to Implement Advisor Recommendations
Implementing solutions based on Advisor recommendations are straightforward and presented in an intuitive, step-wise fashion. After we sign in to the Azure portal, click on Azure Advisor. On the Advisor recommendations dashboard, we need to click on “get recommendations.” We’ll see a list of recommendations (as either inline actions or documentation links, as noted above), from which we’ll choose the one we want and click on it. Carefully review the relevant information regarding the actions we need to perform either to resolve a particular issue or to take advantage of a cost-saving opportunity.
How to Search for Advisor Recommendations
Advisor provides a robust search functionality, enabling us to quickly find the specific recommendations we need. Advisor will let us search for recommendations based on a particular subscription, resource group, or status. After filtering based on our search criteria, we can display Advisor recommendations by clicking on “get recommendations.”
How to Dismiss or “Snooze” Advisor Recommendations
There will be times when we’ll want to dismiss a particular recommendation or delay its implementation. After we start Advisor, click on “get recommendations.” Review listed recommendations and click on the one in which we’re interested. If we want to delay implementation, click on “snooze” and designate a snooze time period. If we want to dismiss the recommendation, click on “never.”
How to Manage Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor analyzes the resources deployed for a particular subscription and then provides recommendations. Depending on the service, it may take some time before relevant data becomes available. Recommendations appear in the Azure Advisor dashboard, but like most Azure services, we can also manage our Azure Advisor through the Azure portal, Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell.
Managing Azure Advisor with Azure Portal
We can manage Azure Advisor recommendations from the Azure Portal dashboard. There are no recommendations in the screenshot below. However, to stay on top of new recommendations, we need to set up notifications and recommendations summaries.
In addition to the Azure portal, We can also use the Azure CLI to manage our Azure Advisor. However, the Azure portal has many more features and settings. For example, We can use the Azure CLI to list, enable, and disable only specific recommendations.
If we run the following command then it will display the complete list of user-configured Azure Advisor configurations.
Azure PowerShell offers users and administrators another option to manage Azure Advisor. But its management options are limited just like the Azure CLI. We can receive, enable, and disable recommendations, and We can receive and set up Azure Advisor configurations.
For example, running the PowerShell command
Get-AzAdvisorConfiguration | fl *
returns the same result as the Azure CLI command
az advisor configuration list
For a complete list of Azure PowerShell Azure Advisor commands, see Microsoft Docs.
Disadvantages of Azure Advisor
We have already seen the benefits of Azure Advisor but it has some shortcomings and limitations. Let's see some of them:
No Multi-Cloud Support: Azure Advisor only offers Azure-based service recommendations. It does not provide guidance for any other platforms like private or public cloud platforms. If an organization has a cloud or hybrid-cloud strategy, this limit means managing multiple solutions or using a third-party platform.
Limited scope: Azure Advisor only analyzes and provides recommendations for the sub-set of Azure services. These include Application Gateway, App Services, Accessibility Sets, Azure Cache, Azure Data Factory, Azure MySQL Database, Azure Database PostgreSQL, Azure Database for MariaDB, Azure ExpressRoute, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Public Addresses, Azure Synapse Analytics, SQL servers, archive accounts, traffic manager profiles, and virtual machines.
No SLA: Azure Advisor is a free service, so it has no SLA.
Limited Automation: Automatic interventions based on Azure Advisor recommendations require effort and technical expertise. We may need to write a code that calls the Azure Advisor API or use the Azure Automation runbook.
Recommendations Limits: Although Azure Advisor provides a long list of recommendations for support services, it does not cover every possibility.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I access Advisor?
You can access Advisor through the Azure portal. Sign in to the portal, locate Advisor in the navigation menu, or search for it in the All services menu.
You can also view Advisor recommendations through the virtual machine resource interface. Choose a virtual machine, and then scroll to Advisor recommendations in the menu
What permissions do I need to access Advisor?
You can access Advisor recommendations as Owner, Contributor, or Reader of a subscription, Resource Group or Resource.
Can I postpone or dismiss a recommendation?
To postpone or dismiss a recommendation, click the Postpone link. You can specify a postpone period or select Never to dismiss the recommendation.
Conclusion
This article discusses Azure Advisor, the kinds of recommendations provided by Azure Advisor, how can we manage Azure Advisor, and many more things about it in detail
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