How Azure Advisor can help you to optimize cloud resources

Startups face constant challenges in managing cloud costs, performance, and security while ensuring scalability. Without proper guidance, teams often overprovision, underutilize, or overlook critical optimizations—leading to unnecessary expenses and inefficiencies.

Azure Advisor simplifies cloud optimization by providing AI-driven, actionable recommendations tailored to your specific Azure environment. Whether you need to reduce costs, enhance performance, or improve security, Azure Advisor continuously analyzes your workloads and suggests best practices to help you maximize efficiency.

In this blog, we’ll explore how startups can leverage Azure Advisor to streamline operations, optimize spending, and ensure reliability in the cloud.

What is Azure advisor?

Azure Advisor is a free service that provides personalized recommendations based on detailed analyses of your configurations, resource usage, and Azure best practices. It offers insights across five main categories:

1. Reliability: Identifies critical configurations to enhance the resilience of your solutions against unexpected outages.
2. Security: Highlights vulnerabilities and suggests actions such as enabling encryption and restricting unauthorized access.
3. Cost Optimization: Analyzes consumption and recommends ways to reduce expenses without compromising performance.
4. Operational Excellence: Provides practices that improve efficiency and reduce operational risks.
5. Performance: Suggests changes to improve the speed and responsiveness of workloads, ensuring optimal user experiences.

By integrating Azure Advisor recommendations into your processes, startups can optimize their environments effectively, minimizing waste and maximizing results.

Key features

1. Data-driven personalized recommendations

Azure Advisor uses data from your Azure environment to suggest practical improvements. Examples include:

• Migration to Reserved VMs: Identifies workloads eligible for discounts through reservation plans.
• Right-Sizing Resources: Suggests resizing underutilized or overprovisioned resources.
• Network and Security Updates: Recommends firewall rules and network configurations to secure your data.
• Performance Enhancements: Identifies virtual machines or other resources experiencing high latency or low throughput and recommends scaling, caching, or other changes to improve performance.

2. Consolidated Azure Advisor score

The Azure Advisor Score is a quantitative metric that evaluates the overall posture of your resources against best practices. 

This score is visualized in a unified dashboard, enabling prioritization based on operational and financial impact.

3. Integration with advanced tools

Azure Advisor integrates with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, enabling a holistic approach to security. It also supports REST APIs and Azure CLI, facilitating automation and large-scale application of recommendations.

Additionally, startups looking for an automated assessment of their Azure environment can leverage Azure quick review (azqr). This open-source tool performs a structured review of Azure workloads, providing insights that complement Azure Advisor’s recommendations, especially around architecture best practices and governance.

Advanced benefits

1. Data-Driven Cost Savings With detailed insights, Azure Advisor identifies resources like managed disks and VMs that can be shifted to more economical options, such as Azure Spot VMs. For instance, migrating non-critical workloads to low-priority instances can reduce costs by up to 90%.
   
   
2. End-to-End Security By integrating with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Advisor provides detailed recommendations such as configuring Private Endpoints and monitoring exposed credentials.
   
   
3. Enhanced Performance Azure Advisor identifies performance bottlenecks, such as underperforming VMs or high-latency disks. Recommendations include scaling virtual machines, enabling caching, or upgrading to faster disk types to improve workload responsiveness and user experience.
   
   
4. Automated Remediation With support for Azure Policy, startups can automatically implement recommendations. For example, creating a policy to ensure all VMs are associated with network security groups (NSGs).
   
   
5. High Availability and Resilience Recommendations such as enabling Availability Zones for critical databases help boost the resilience of essential applications.

Practical case studies

Example 1: Startup TechX

• Challenge: High costs due to underutilized instances and lack of redundancy in critical workloads.
• Solution: Azure Advisor identified underutilized resources, suggesting a transition to Reserved Instances and enabling Availability Zones.
• Result: 35% reduction in operational costs and improved system resilience.

Example 2: Startup HealthPlus

• Challenge: Vulnerabilities in sensitive storage without encryption.
• Solution: Implemented encryption on managed disks and restricted access using Private Endpoints.
• Result: Environment aligned with compliance regulations and enhanced data security.

Example 3: Startup DataDriven

• Challenge: Slow performance in database workloads due to high disk latency.
• Solution: Azure Advisor suggested migrating to Premium Managed Disks and configuring read-intensive caching.
• Result: 50% improvement in query performance and increased customer satisfaction.

Example 4: Startup GreenCloud

• Challenge: High expenses from development instances running 24/7.
• Solution: Azure Advisor recommended using Azure Automation to shut down VMs outside business hours.
• Result: 40% monthly infrastructure cost savings.

Example 5: Startup FastTrack

• Challenge: Website experiencing slow response times during traffic spikes.
• Solution: Azure Advisor recommended scaling out the web servers and implementing Azure Front Door for load balancing.
• Result: 70% improvement in page load times and reduced customer complaints.

Azure Advisor optimization checklist & best practices

• Step1: Set up alerts for proactive monitoring

  • Enable Azure Advisor Alerts to receive real-time notifications on new recommendations.

  • Subscribe to the Azure Advisor Recommendations Digest for a summary of optimization opportunities.
    
    

• Step 2: Review recommendations regularly

  • Check Azure Advisor recommendations weekly to track cost, security, performance, reliability, and operational improvements.

  • Prioritize recommendations using Advisor Score to focus on high-impact optimizations.
    
    

• Step 3: Automate remediations & scaling
  • Configure VM & VMSS cost recommendations to optimize compute spending.

  • Use automation for efficiency leveraging Azure CLI, PowerShell, and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to automate the implementation of Azure Advisor recommendations.

    • Identify optimization opportunities with a script:

      az advisor recommendation list --query "[].{Category:category, Impact:impact, Resource:impactedValue, Recommendation:shortDescription.problem}" -o table

      Command output

      Note: If you prefer to see the full path where the resource is located instead of just its name, try this command, replacing impactedValue with resourceMetadata.resourceId.
      

      az advisor recommendation list --query "[].{Category:category, Impact:impact, Resource:resourceMetadata.resourceId, Recommendation:shortDescription.problem}" -o table

    •  Automate remediation: Adjust VM sizes, scale sets, and configurations dynamically based on cost-saving or performance insights.

    • Integrate with DevOps: Use Azure Policy, Bicep, or Terraform to enforce cost-efficient configurations proactively.
      
      

• Step 4: Integrate advisor insights with monitoring & analytics

  • Utilize Azure Advisor Workbooks for visualizing trends and tracking remediation progress.

  • Link recommendations with Azure Monitor and Microsoft Defender for Cloud for deeper analysis and security enforcement.

  • Complement recommendations with Azure Quick Review (azqr) for an automated assessment of governance and compliance best practices.
    
    

• Step 5: Empower teams & share insights

  • Train the team: Ensure the technical team is equipped to interpret and apply Advisor recommendations effectively.

  • Share progress reports with finance and operations teams to align cloud spending with business goals.

  • Maintain a continuous review cycle, ensuring recommendations are evaluated and implemented regularly.

Conclusion

Azure Advisor is a robust and essential tool for startups looking to optimize their cloud resources. With a data-driven approach, it enables startups to not only save costs but also enhance security, reliability, and operational efficiency. By integrating Azure Advisor into your strategy, startups can focus on what matters most: innovation and growth.

Start optimizing your cloud resources today!

• 📌 Step 1: Log in to the Azure Portal and navigate to Azure Advisor.
• 📌 Step 2: Review your personalized recommendations across cost, performance, security, reliability, and operational excellence.
• 📌 Step 3: Take action—apply best practices, automate optimizations with Azure Policy, and integrate with Azure Monitor for continuous improvements.

🚀 Want to dive deeper? Explore the Azure Advisor documentation or check out this hands-on guide to get started!