Azure Advisor: The Expert in the House

It’s always a good thing to get free recommendations from experts, and Azure Advisor is one such good thing.

When clicking on the Advisor tab, you will be presented with a dashboard. Give it some time to load, and you will be shown your personalised recommendations split into four categories.

The categories are availability, security, performance, and cost. One example of each, starting with availability is enabling soft delete of blobs on storage accounts so that any accidental deletion can be recovered. An example of security is to enable secure transfer, again on storage accounts, to force all requests to be downloaded via HTTPS. For performance, Advisor can suggest optimal cache sizes and database optimisation. Finally, for costs, the tool can detect underutilised VMs and propose to switch them off or scale them down.

Often there is minimal friction in order to implement the recommended fix, providing you with details about the tip and a list of steps. Sometimes Advisor will happily do it for you if you decide to go for it. Let’s try one of the suggestions, I will go for high availability.

Here I am being told that creating an Azure Service Health alert will notify me of any server issues that affect my resources. This has a low impact because it will not result in any changes to the resources themselves. Let’s drill down further into the recommendation.

Here I have a short description of the benefits of rolling out this change, and a link to more detailed information. I also have the option to postpone this recommendation for a day, week, month, or quarter, or just dismiss so that I don’t get notified again with this suggestion. Most importantly, I have the option to create an Azure service health alert.

I’ll just fill in the required details so I get notified of service interruptions concerning any resources related to my website. The events that can trigger an alert are service issue, planned maintenance and health advisories. I can choose to be notified for any combination of them.

Then it’s just a matter of clicking the create button and we're good to go.