Get started with Azure Advisor

Learn how to access Advisor through the Azure portal, get recommendations, and implement recommendations.

Get recommendations

1. Sign in to the Azure portal.

2. In the left pane, click Advisor. If you do not see Advisor in the left pane, click All services. In the service menu pane, under Monitoring and Management, click Advisor. The Advisor dashboard is displayed.

   

3. The Advisor dashboard will display a summary of your recommendations for all selected subscriptions. You can choose the subscriptions that you want recommendations to be displayed for using the subscription filter dropdown.

4. To get recommendations for a specific category, click one of the tabs: Cost, Security, Reliability, Operational Excellence, or Performance.

   

Get recommendation details and implement a solution

You can select a recommendation in Advisor to view additional details - such as the recommendation actions and impacted resources - and to implement the solution to the recommendation.

1. Sign in to the Azure portal, and then open Advisor.

2. Select a recommendation category to display the list of recommendations within that category, or select the All tab to view all your recommendations.

3. Click a recommendation that you want to review in detail.

4. Review the information about the recommendation and the resources that the recommendation applies to.

5. Click on the Recommended Action to implement the recommendation.

Filter recommendations

You can filter recommendations to drill down to what is most important to you. You can filter by subscription, resource type, or recommendation status.

1. Sign in to the Azure portal, and then open Advisor.

2. Use the dropdowns on the Advisor dashboard to filter by subscription, resource type, or recommendation status.

   

Postpone or dismiss recommendations

1. Sign in to the Azure portal, and then open Advisor.

2. Navigate to the recommendation you want to postpone or dismiss.

3. Click the recommendation.

4. Click Postpone.

5. Specify a postpone time period, or select Never to dismiss the recommendation.

Exclude subscriptions or resource groups

You may have resource groups or subscriptions for which you do not want to receive Advisor recommendations - such as ‘test’ resources. You can configure Advisor to only generate recommendations for specific subscriptions and resource groups.

1. Sign in to the Azure portal, and then open Advisor.

2. Click Configure in the action bar.

3. Uncheck any subscriptions or resource groups you do not want to receive Advisor recommendations for.

   

4. Click the Apply button.

Configure low usage VM recommendation

This procedure configures the average CPU utilization rule for the low usage virtual machine recommendation.

Advisor monitors your virtual machine usage for 7 days by default and then identifies low-utilization virtual machines. Virtual machines are considered low-utilization if their CPU utilization is 5% or less and their network utilization is less than 2% or if the current workload can be accommodated by a smaller virtual machine size.

If you would like to be more aggressive at identifying low usage virtual machines, you can adjust the average CPU utilization rule and the look back period on a per subscription basis. The CPU utilization rule can be set to 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, or 100%(Default). In case the trigger is selected as 100%, it will present recommendations for virtual machines with less than 5%, 10%, 15%, and 20% of CPU utilization. You can select how far back in historical data you want to analyze: 7 days (default), 14, 21, 30, 60, or 90 days.

1. Sign in to the Azure portal, and then open Advisor.

2. Click Configure in the action bar.

3. Click the Rules tab.

4. Select the subscriptions you’d like to adjust the average CPU utilization rule for, and then click Edit.

5. Select the desired average CPU utilization value, and click Apply.

6. Click Refresh recommendations to update your existing recommendations to use the new average CPU utilization rule.

   

Download recommendations

Advisor enables you to download a summary of your recommendations. You can download your recommendations as a PDF file or a CSV file. Downloading your recommendations enables you to easily share with your colleagues or perform your own analysis on top of the recommendation data.

1. Sign in to the Azure portal, and then open Advisor.

2. Click Download as CSV or Download as PDF on the action bar.

The download option respects any filters you have applied to the Advisor dashboard. 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.

Next steps

To learn more about Advisor, see:

• Introduction to Azure Advisor
• Advisor Cost recommendations
• Advisor Security recommendations
• Advisor Reliability recommendations
• Advisor Operational Excellence recommendations
• Advisor Performance recommendations