Azure Advisor Resiliency Reviews

Azure Advisor Resiliency Reviews help you focus on the most important recommendations to optimize your cloud deployments and improve resiliency. Review recommendations are tailored to the needs of your workload and include custom ones curated by your account team using Azure best practices and prioritized automated recommendations.

You can find resiliency reviews in Azure Advisor, which serves as your single-entry point for Microsoft best practices.

In this article, you learn how to enable and access resiliency reviews prepared for you, triage, manage, implement, and track recommendations' lifecycles.

Terminology

  • Triage recommendations means to accept or reject a recommendation.
  • Manage recommendation lifecycle means to mark a recommendation as completed, postponed or dismissed, in progress, or not started. You can only manage a recommendation is in the Accepted state.

How it works

After you request a review, Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect engineers perform extensive analysis, curate the list of prioritized recommendations, and publish a resiliency review. You triage the recommendations and implement them. Your Microsoft account team works with you to facilitate the process.

The following table defines the responsible parties for Advisor actions:

Responsibility Description
Request a resiliency review Customer via your Customer Success Account Manager or aligned Cloud Solution Architect.
Analyze workload configuration, perform the review via the Well Architected Reliability Assessment and prepare recommendations Microsoft account team. Team members include Account Managers, Engineers, and Cloud Solution Architects.
Triage recommendations to accept or reject them. Customer. Triage is done by team members who have authority to make decisions about workload optimization priorities.
Manage recommendations' lifecycle. Customer. Setting the status of accepted recommendation as completed, postponed or dismissed, in progress, or not started.
Implement recommendations that were accepted Customer. Implementation is done by engineers who are responsible for managing resources and their configuration.
Facilitate implementation Microsoft account team via your support contract.

Enable reviews

Resiliency reviews are available to customers with Unified or Premier Support contracts via a Well Architected Reliability Assessment. To initiate a review, reach out to your Customer Success Account Manager. You can find their contacts in Services Hub.

Your Microsoft account team works with you to collect information about the workload. They need to know which subscriptions are used for the workload, and which subscriptions they should use to publish the review and recommendations. You need to work with the owner of this subscription to configure permissions for your team.

View and triage recommendations

To view or triage recommendations, or to manage recommendations' lifecycles, requires specific role permissions. For definitions, see Terminology.

Reviews and personalized recommendations

Roles to manage access to Advisor reviews

The permissions vary by role. The roles must be configured for the subscription that was used to publish the review.

Role View reviews for a workload and all recommendations associated with the reviews Triage recommendations associated with the reviews
Advisor Reviews Reader X
Advisor Reviews Contributor X X
Subscription Reader X
Subscription Contributor X X
Subscription Owner X X

Roles to manage access to Advisor personalized recommendations

The roles must be configured for the subscriptions included in the workload under a review.

Role View accepted recommendations Manage the lifecycle of a recommendation
Advisor Recommendations Contributor (Assessments and Reviews) X X
Subscription Reader X
Subscription Contributor X
Subscription Owner X

Learn how to assign an Azure role, see Steps to assign an Azure role.

Access reviews

You can find resiliency reviews created by your account team in the left navigation pane under the Manage > Reviews (Preview) menu in Azure Advisor.

If there's a new review available to you, you see a notification banner on top of the Advisor pages. A New review is one with all recommendations in the Pending state.

  1. Open the Azure portal and navigate to Advisor. Select Manage > Reviews (Preview) in the left navigation pane. A list of reviews opens. At the top of the page, you see the number of Total Reviews and review Recommendations, and a graph of Reviews by status.

  2. Use search, filters, and sorting to find the review you need. You can filter reviews by one of the Status equals states shown next, or choose All (the default) to see all reviews. If you don’t see a review for your subscription, make sure the review subscription is included in the global portal filter. You might need to update the filter to see the reviews for a subscription.

    • New: No recommendations are triaged (accepted or rejected)
    • In progress: Some recommendations aren't triaged
    • Triaged: All recommendations are triaged
    • Completed: All accepted-state recommendations are implemented, postponed, or dismissed

Screenshot of the Azure Advisor Resiliency Reviews opening page.

At the top of the reviews page, use Feedback to tell us about your experience. Use the Refresh button to refresh the page as needed.

Note

If you have no reviews, the Reviews menu item in the left navigation is hidden.

Review recommendations

The triage process includes reviewing recommendations and making decisions on which to implement. Use Accept and Reject actions to capture your decision. Accepted recommendations are available to your engineering team under the Advisor Reliability menu item.

Screenshot of the Azure Advisor Reliability menu highlight.

  1. From the Reviews page, select a review name to open the recommendations list page. For new reviews, recommendations are in Pending state.
  2. Take a note of recommendations priority. Priority is defined by your account team to help you decide which recommendations should be implemented first. Screenshot of the Azure Advisor Resiliency Reviews recommendation list with pending recommendations.
  3. Select a recommendation Title or the Impacted subscriptions view link to get detailed information. A pane opens with details – description, potential benefits, and notes from your account team along with the list of impacted subscriptions. Screenshot of the Azure Advisor Resiliency Reviews recommendation list page with the details pane of a selected recommendation.
  4. If all recommendations for that review are triaged, none appear in the Pending view; select the Accepted or Rejected tabs to view those recommendations.

Recommendation priority

The priority of a recommendation is based on the impact and urgency of the suggested improvements. Your account team sets recommendation priority.

  • Critical: The most important recommendations that can have a significant impact on your Azure resources. They should be addressed as soon as possible to avoid potential issues such as security breaches, data loss, or service outages.
  • High: The recommendations that can improve the performance, reliability, or cost efficiency of your Azure resources. They should be addressed in a timely manner to optimize your Azure deployments.
  • Medium: The recommendations that can enhance the operational excellence or user experience of your Azure resources. They should be considered and implemented if they align with your business goals and requirements.
  • Low: The recommendations that can provide extra benefits or insights for your Azure resources. They should be reviewed and implemented if they're relevant and feasible for your scenario.
  • Informational: The recommendations that can help you learn more about the features and capabilities of Azure. They don't require any action, but they can help you discover new ways to use Azure.

Accept recommendations

You must accept recommendations for your engineering team to start implementation. When a review recommendation is accepted, it becomes available under the Advisor Reliability page where it can be acted on.

From a review recommendations details page:

  1. You can accept a single recommendation by clicking Accept.
  2. You can accept multiple recommendations at a time by selecting them using the checkbox control and clicking Accept.
  3. Accepted recommendations are moved to the Accepted tab and become visible to your engineering team under Recommendations > Reliability. Screenshot of the Azure Advisor Resiliency Reviews recommendation list page of accepted recommendations.
  4. If you accepted a recommendation by mistake, use Reset to move it back to the pending state.

Reject recommendations

  1. You can reject a recommendation if you disagree with it.
  2. You must select a reason when you reject a recommendation. Select one of the reasons from the list of available options. Screenshot of the Azure Advisor Resiliency Reviews recommendations reject options.
  3. The rejected recommendation is moved to the Rejected tab. Rejected recommendations aren't visible for your engineering team under Recommendations > Reliability. Screenshot of the Azure Advisor Resiliency Reviews recommendations page of rejected recommendations.
  4. You can reject multiple recommendations at a time using the checkbox control, and the same reason for rejection is applied to all selected recommendations. If you need to select a different reason, reject one recommendation at a time.
  5. If you reject a recommendation by mistake, select Reset to move it back to the pending state and tab.

Note

The reason for the rejection is visible to your account team. It helps them understand workload context and your business priorities better. Additionally, Microsoft uses this information to improve the quality of recommendations.

Implement recommendations

Once review recommendations are triaged, all recommendations with Accepted status become available on the Advisor Reliability page with links to the resources needing action. Typically, an engineer on your team implements the recommendations by going to the resource page and making the recommended change.

For definitions on recommendation states, see Terminology.

Prerequisites to implement recommendations

For details on permissions to act on recommendations, see Permissions in Azure Advisor - Azure Advisor | Microsoft Learn.

Access accepted review recommendations

To view Accepted review recommendations, go to Recommendations > Reliability in the left navigation to open the Reliability page at the Reviews tab, by default.

The recommendations are grouped by type:

  • Reviews: These recommendations are part of a review for a selected workload.
  • Automated: These recommendations are the standard Advisor recommendations for the selected subscriptions.

Note

If none of your resiliency review recommendations are in the Accepted state, the Reviews tab is hidden.

Screenshot of the Azure Advisor Resiliency Reviews recommendations page of accepted recommendations.

You can filter the recommendations by subscription, priority, and workload, as well as sort the recommendation list.

You can sort recommendations using column headers - Priority (Critical, High, Medium, Low, Informational), Description, Impacted resources, Review name, Potential benefits, or Last updated date.

View recommendation details

Select a recommendation description to open a details page. Your account team adds the Description, Potential benefits, and Notes when the review is prepared.

Screenshot of the Azure Advisor Reliability page for a Resiliency Reviews recommendation.

The options in the Reliability recommendations detail differ from those in the Reviews recommendations detail. Here, a team developer can open the Impacted subscriptions link and take direct action.

For details on recommendation priority, see Recommendation priority.

Manage recommendation lifecycle

Recommendation status is a valuable indicator for determining what actions need to be taken.

  • Once you begin to implement a recommendation, mark it as In progress.
  • Once the recommendation is implemented, the recommended action is taken, update the status to Completed. When all recommendations in a review are marked as Completed, the review is marked as Completed on the Review page.
  • You can also postpone the recommendation for action later.
  • You can dismiss a recommendation if you don't plan to implement it. If you dismiss the recommendation, you must give a reason, just as you must give a reason if you reject a recommendation in a review.

Screenshot of the Azure Advisor Resiliency Reviews recommendations dismiss options.

Review maintenance

Your Microsoft account team engineers keep track of the results of your actions on resiliency reviews and continue to refine the recommendation reviews accordingly.

Next steps

To learn more about Advisor reliability recommendations, see:

Improve the reliability of your business-critical applications using Azure Advisor.

Reliability recommendations.