Get started with Azure Advisor

Learn how to access Advisor through the Azure portal, get and manage recommendations, and configure Advisor settings.

Note

Azure Advisor runs in the background to find newly created resources. It can take up to 24 hours to provide recommendations on those resources.

Open Advisor

To access Azure Advisor, sign in to the Azure portal and open Advisor. The Advisor score page opens by default.

You can also use the search bar at the top, or the left navigation pane, to find Advisor.

Screenshot of the Azure Advisor opening score page.

Read your score

See how your system configuration measures against Azure best practices.

Screenshot detail of Azure Advisor workloads score graphs.

  • The far-left graphic is your overall system Advisor score against Azure best practices. The Learn more link opens the Optimize Azure workloads by using Advisor score page.

  • The middle graphic depicts the trend of your system Advisor score history. Roll over the graphic to activate a slider to see your trend at different points of time. Use the drop-down menu to pick a trend time frame.

  • The far-right graphic shows a breakdown of your best practices Advisor score per category. Click a category bar to open the recommendations page for that category.

Get recommendations

To display a specific list of recommendations, click a category tile.

The tiles on the Advisor score page show the different categories of recommendations per subscription:

  • To get recommendations for a specific category, click one of the tiles. To open a list of all recommendations for all categories, click the All recommendations tile. By default, the Cost tile is selected.

  • You can filter the display using the buttons at the top of the page:

    • Subscription: Choose All for Advisor recommendations on all subscriptions. Alternatively, select specific subscriptions. Apply changes by clicking outside of the button.
    • Recommendation Status: Active (the default, recommendations that you haven't postponed or dismissed), Postponed or Dismissed. Apply changes by clicking outside of the button.
    • Resource Group: Choose All (the default) or specific resource groups. Apply changes by clicking outside of the button.
    • Type: Choose All (the default) or specific resources. Apply changes by clicking outside of the button.
    • Commitments: Applicable only to cost recommendations. Adjust your subscription Cost recommendations to reflect your committed Term (years) and chosen Look-back period (days). Apply changes by clicking Apply.
    • For more advanced filtering, click Add filter.
  • The Commitments button lets you adjust your subscription Cost recommendations to reflect your committed Term (years) and chosen Look-back period (days).

Get recommendation details and solution options

View recommendation details – such as the recommended actions and impacted resources – and the solution options, including postponing or dismissing a recommendation.

  1. To review details of a recommendation, including the affected resources, open the recommendation list for a category and then click the Description or the Impacted resources link for a specific recommendation. The following screenshot shows a Reliability recommendation details page.

    Screenshot of Azure Advisor reliability recommendation details example.

  2. To see action details, click a Recommended actions link. The Azure page where you can act opens. Alternatively, open a page to the affected resources to take the recommended action (the two pages may be the same).

    Understand the recommendation before you act by clicking the Learn more link on the recommended action page, or at the top of the recommendations details page.

  3. You can postpone the recommendation.

Sreenshot of Azure Advisor recommendation postpone option.

You can't dismiss the recommendation without certain privileges. For information on permissions, see Permissions in Azure Advisor.

Download recommendations

To download your recommendations from the Advisor score or any recommendation details page, click Download as CSV or Download as PDF on the action bar at the top. The download option respects any filters you have applied to Advisor. If you select the download option while viewing a specific recommendation category or recommendation, the downloaded summary only includes information for that category or recommendation.

Configure recommendations

You can exclude subscriptions or resources, such as 'test' resources, from Advisor recommendations and configure Advisor to generate recommendations only for specific subscriptions and resource groups.

Note

To change subscriptions or Advisor compute rules, you must be a subscription Owner. If you do not have the required permissions, the option is disabled in the user interface. For information on permissions, see Permissions in Azure Advisor. For details on right sizing VMs, see Reduce service costs by using Azure Advisor.

From any Azure Advisor page, click Configuration in the left navigation pane. The Advisor Configuration page opens with the Resources tab selected, by default.

Screenshot of Azure Advisor configuration option for resources.

  • Resources: Uncheck any subscriptions you don't want to receive Advisor recommendations for, click Apply. The page refreshes.

  • VM/VMSS right sizing: You can adjust Advisor virtual machine (VM) and virtual machine scale sets (VMSS) recommendations. Specifically, you can setup a filter for each subscription to only show recommendations for machines with certain CPU utilization. This setting will filter recommendations but will not change how they are generated.

    1. Select the subscriptions you’d like to setup a filter for average CPU utilization, and then click Edit. Not all subscriptions can be edited for VM/VMSS right sizing and certain privileges are required; for more information on permissions, see Permissions in Azure Advisor.

    2. Select the desired average CPU utilization value and click Apply. It can take up to 24 hours for the new settings to be reflected in recommendations.

    Screenshot of Azure Advisor configuration option for VM/VMSS sizing rules.

Next steps

To learn more about Advisor, see: