Inquiry on Azure Default Cost Recommendations for FinOps Dashboard for last 90 days or 60 days of Recommendations. Does it Provide any Recommendation History

Question

Subject: Inquiry on Azure Default Cost Recommendations for FinOps Dashboard for the last 90 days or 60 days of Recommendations

Dear Azure Support Team,

I hope you are doing well.

We are currently working on a FinOps dashboard within our organization to help optimize cloud spending and resource utilization. As part of this initiative, we want to incorporate Azure's default cost recommendations for various resources into our dashboard.

Could you please provide details on:

• The default cost recommendations Azure provides for different resources.
• Any APIs or reports available to fetch these recommendations programmatically?
• Guidance on how we can integrate these recommendations into our FinOps dashboard.
• Any best practices or additional insights Azure recommends for cost optimization?
• If we need recommendations for the last 60 or 90 days, what is the process to retrieve this historical data?

Your support on this would be greatly appreciated, as it will help us enhance our FinOps capabilities and drive better cost efficiency.

 

Looking forward to your response.

Thanks

Answer 1

Hi Khandare Rushikesh,

To access the recommendations programmatically, Azure provides a number of APIs and tools that you can include in your dashboard. The first service you would utilize is the Azure Advisor, which gives you personalized best practices and recommendations for cost, security, reliability, operational excellence, and performance.

Azure Advisor API: This can be used to fetch cost suggestions. You can access them programmatically and even filter them as per your needs. The getting started link to the documentation is here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/advisor/

Azure Resource Graph: Another nice query tool to analyze your resources and their setups. This can be utilized to extract more insights regarding your usage and cost of resources. Take a look at the documentation here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/resource-graph/overview

To incorporate these suggestions into your FinOps dashboard:

Utilize the Azure Advisor API to retrieve recommendations. You can schedule these calls so that your dashboard is constantly updated with the most recent insights.

After you have the data, you can utilize visualization tools such as Power BI, Grafana, or other dashboard tools your company utilizes to present these insights in a simple to grasp format.

Implement these recommendations in your business processes. Provide clear instructions or automated scripts through which your teams can implement the recommended changes at ease.

Cost Optimization Best Practices:

Regularly review your Azure billing and cost management insights to recognize trends and outliers and configure budget alerts to warn you when your expenditure surpasses specified limits. Use reserved instances for regular workloads to optimize costs, regularly review and decommission idle resources.

Azure Advisor now makes real-time suggestions but does not keep a record of previous suggestions. In order to keep a record of recommendations for 60 or 90 days, you can take initiative. One method is to utilize Azure Log Analytics in order to keep recommendation data over a period of time so that you can see changes and patterns. Or, as a custom approach, you can pull recommendations via the Advisor API and save them within a database so that you can access them later. Verify the documentation here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/logs/log-analytics-overview?

For more detailed insights and best practices, you can refer to: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/

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