FinOps best practices for general resource management

This article outlines a collection of general FinOps best practices that can be applied to various Microsoft Cloud services. It includes strategies for optimizing costs, improving efficiency, and using Azure Resource Graph (ARG) queries to gain insights into your resources. By following these practices, you can ensure that your cloud services are cost-effective and aligned with your organization's financial goals.


Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that helps you follow best practices to optimize your Azure deployments. It analyzes your resource configuration and usage telemetry and recommends solutions that can help you reduce costs, improve performance, increase reliability, and enhance security.

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Review Azure Advisor cost recommendations

Recommendation: Regularly review and act on Azure Advisor cost recommendations to identify savings opportunities across your environment.

About Azure Advisor cost recommendations

Azure Advisor analyzes your resource configuration and usage to identify cost-saving opportunities. Cost recommendations include actions like resizing or shutting down underutilized resources, purchasing reservations, and right-sizing workloads. By reviewing these recommendations regularly, you can ensure your environment stays optimized as usage patterns change.

Note

FinOps hubs can automatically ingest Azure Advisor cost recommendations. Learn more.

Identify Azure Advisor cost recommendations

Use the following ARG query to surface all cost recommendations from Azure Advisor, including impact details and extended properties.

advisorresources
| where type == 'microsoft.advisor/recommendations'
| where properties.category == 'Cost'
| project
    id,
    subscriptionId,
    resourceGroup,
    ResourceId = tostring(properties.resourceMetadata.resourceId),
    ResourceType = tostring(properties.impactedField),
    Impact = tostring(properties.impact),
    Description = tostring(properties.shortDescription.problem),
    Solution = tostring(properties.shortDescription.solution),
    RecommendationTypeId = tostring(properties.recommendationTypeId),
    LastUpdated = tostring(properties.lastUpdated),
    ExtendedProperties = properties.extendedProperties

Carbon Optimization

The following section provides an ARG query for carbon optimization. It helps you gain insights into your Azure resources and identify opportunities to reduce carbon emissions. By analyzing recommendations from Azure Advisor, you can optimize your cloud infrastructure for sustainability and environmental impact.

Query: Carbon emissions

This ARG query identifies resources within your Azure environment that have recommendations for reducing carbon emissions, based on Azure Advisor recommendations.

Description

This query surfaces Azure resources with recommendations from Azure Advisor for optimizing carbon emissions. It highlights potential carbon savings and provides insights into how these recommendations can be implemented to reduce the carbon footprint of your cloud infrastructure.

Category

Sustainability

Query

advisorresources
| where tolower(type) == "microsoft.advisor/recommendations"
| extend RecommendationTypeId = tostring(properties.recommendationTypeId)
| where RecommendationTypeId in ("94aea435-ef39-493f-a547-8408092c22a7", "e10b1381-5f0a-47ff-8c7b-37bd13d7c974")
| extend properties = parse_json(properties)
| project
    subscriptionId,
    resourceGroup,
    ResourceId = properties.resourceMetadata.resourceId,
    ResourceType = tostring(properties.impactedField),
    shortDescription = properties.shortDescription.problem,
    recommendationType = properties.extendedProperties.recommendationType,
    recommendationMessage = properties.extendedProperties.recommendationMessage,
    PotentialMonthlyCarbonEmissions = properties.extendedProperties.PotentialMonthlyCarbonEmissions,
    PotentialMonthlyCarbonSavings = toreal(properties.extendedProperties.PotentialMonthlyCarbonSavings),
    properties

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