Learn about the key capabilities of Azure Advisor and get answers to frequently asked questions.
What is Advisor?
Advisor is a digital cloud assistant that helps you follow best practices to optimize your Azure deployments. It analyzes your resource configuration and usage telemetry and then recommends solutions that can help you improve the cost effectiveness, performance, reliability, and security of your Azure resources.
With Advisor, you can:
Get proactive, actionable, and personalized best practices recommendations.
Improve the performance, security, and reliability of your resources, as you identify opportunities to reduce your overall Azure spend.
Get recommendations with proposed actions inline.
You can access Advisor through the Azure portal. Sign in to the portal, locate Advisor on the navigation pane, or search for it on the All services menu.
The Advisor dashboard displays personalized recommendations for all your subscriptions. The recommendations are divided into five categories:
Reliability: To ensure and improve the continuity of your business-critical applications. For more information, see Advisor reliability recommendations.
Security: To detect threats and vulnerabilities that might lead to security breaches. For more information, see Advisor security recommendations.
Cost: To optimize and reduce your overall Azure spending. For more information, see Advisor cost recommendations.
Operational excellence: To help you achieve process and workflow efficiency, resource manageability, and deployment best practices. For more information, see Advisor operational excellence recommendations.
You can apply filters to display recommendations for specific subscriptions and resource types.
Select a category to display the list of recommendations for that category. Select a recommendation to learn more about it. You can also learn about actions that you can perform to take advantage of an opportunity or resolve an issue.
Select the recommended action for a recommendation to implement the recommendation. A simple interface opens that enables you to implement the recommendation. It also might refer you to documentation that assists you with implementation. After you implement a recommendation, it can take up to a day for Advisor to recognize the action.
If you don't intend to take immediate action on a recommendation, you can postpone it for a specified time period. You can also dismiss it. If you don't want to receive recommendations for a specific subscription or resource group, you can configure Advisor to only generate recommendations for specified subscriptions and resource groups.
Frequently asked questions
Here are answers to common questions about Advisor.
How do I access Advisor?
You can access Advisor through the Azure portal. Sign in to the portal, locate Advisor on the navigation pane, or search for it on the All services menu.
What permissions do I need to access Advisor?
You can access Advisor recommendations as the Owner, Contributor, or Reader of a subscription, resource group, or resource.
What resources does Advisor provide recommendations for?
Advisor provides recommendations for the following services:
Azure API Management
Azure Application Gateway
Azure App Service
Availability sets
Azure Cache
Azure Database for MySQL
Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Azure Farmbeats
Azure Stack ACI
Azure public IP addresses
Azure Synapse Analytics
Central server
Azure Cognitive Services
Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Data Explorer
Azure Data Factory
Databricks Workspace
Azure ExpressRoute
Azure Front Door
Azure HDInsight cluster
Azure IoT Hub
Azure Key Vault
Azure Kubernetes Service
Log Analytics
Azure Cache for Redis server
SQL Server
Azure Storage account
Azure Traffic Manager profile
Azure Virtual Machines
Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Azure Virtual Network gateway
Advisor also includes your recommendations from Microsoft Defender for Cloud, which might include recommendations for other resource types.
Can I postpone or dismiss a recommendation?
To postpone or dismiss a recommendation, select Postpone or Dismiss. The recommendation is moved to the Postponed/Dismissed tab on the recommendation list page.
Related articles
For more information about Azure Advisor, see the following articles.