Microsoft Azure – Using Cost Recommendations on Azure Advisor

In this article, you learn how to save money in Azure using Azure Advisor cost recommendations. Azure Advisor is a single pane of glass for all your Azure best practices. It analyzes your subscriptions, environment, and configurations to generate best practice recommendations, which are super actionable and tailor-made for you.

These recommendations can give you a benefit in categories like cost, high availability, security, performance, and operational excellence. Cost is super important for customers and Azure has some high-impact recommendations, which can optimize your subscription for cost and also save some quick money for the subscriptions.

Implementation:

So, like in the Azure portal, you can go to Advisor by typing Advisor in the search and you will see the first item. If you click on it, you will get to the Azure Advisor landing page. There, you can see the categories and the summary for recommendations for each of the categories.

Then, go in the cost category. So, in this category, you have four active recommendations for your subscription—one high impact, one with medium impact, and two low impact recommendations. It’s impacting your eight resources overall for your subscription. This is the page where you will see the list of the recommendations. You can also see the potential savings for each of these recommendations. 

So, in this article, we are going to pick one for demonstration, which is the right size or shut down your VM. What it does is like it analyzes the usage for your VM like CPU utilization, network utilization, and memory pressure. And based on that, it recommends you to either resize or right size or shut down your VM. So by clicking on recommendation type, you get to this page, which is the recommendation detail page. Here, you can learn more about this recommendation and you will see a list of resources for which the recommended actions are being given by Azure to you. So, take an example of a resource. 

Based on data usage analysis, Azure has recommended shutting down and you will save money if you do that. You click on this recommended action and you will see this page. It has all the details about this resource and then you have a shutdown button, which you can click and you have remediated it and saved money.