What's new in Azure Advisor?

You can learn about what's new in Azure Advisor with the items in this article. These items might be release notes, videos, blog posts, and other types of information. Bookmark this page to stay up to date with the service.

In the Azure portal, Advisor currently shows potential aggregated cost savings under the label Potential yearly savings based on retail pricing on pages where cost recommendations appear. This aggregated savings estimate will be removed from the Azure portal on September 30, 2024. You can still evaluate potential yearly savings tailored to your specific needs by following the steps in Calculate cost savings. All individual recommendations and their associated potential savings will remain available.

If you want to continue calculating aggregated potential yearly savings, follow these steps. Individual recommendations might show savings that overlap with the savings shown in other recommendations, although you might not be able to benefit from them concurrently. For example, you can benefit from savings plans or from reservations for virtual machines (VMs), but not typically from both on the same VMs.

Advisor now has zone-redundant storage (ZRS) recommendations for Azure managed disks. Disks with ZRS provide synchronous replication of data across three availability zones in a region, enabling disks to tolerate zonal failures without causing disruptions to your application. By adopting this recommendation, you can now design your solutions to utilize ZRS disks. Access these recommendations through the Advisor portal and APIs.

To learn more, see Use Azure disks with zone-redundant storage for higher resiliency and availability.

Advisor now has a new version of the Service Retirement workbook that includes three major changes:

• Ten new services are onboarded to the workbook. The retirement workbook now covers 40 services.
• Seven services that completed their retirement lifecycle are off-boarded.
• User experience and navigation are improved.

List of the newly added services:

List of the removed services:

User experience improvements:

• Resource details grid: Now, the resource details are readily available by default. Previously, they were only visible after selecting a service.
• Resource link: The Resource link now opens in a context pane. Previously, it opened on the same tab.

To learn more, see Prepare migration of your workloads affected by service retirement.

Advisor now provides Azure Service Health alert recommendations for subscriptions that don't have Service Health alerts configured. The link redirects you to the Service Health page. There, you can create and customize alerts based on the class of service health notification, affected subscriptions, services, and regions.

Service Health alerts keep you informed about issues and advisories in four areas: Service issues, Planned maintenance, Security advisories, and Health advisories. The alerts can be crucial for incident preparedness.

To learn more, see Service Health portal classic experience overview.

Advisor now provides availability zone recommendations. By adopting these recommendations, you can design your solutions to utilize zonal VMs, ensuring the isolation of your VMs from potential failures in other zones. With zonal deployment, you can expect enhanced resiliency in your workload by avoiding downtime and business interruptions.

To learn more, see Use availability zones for better resiliency and availability.

Advisor now offers the capability of grouping or filtering recommendations by workload. The feature is available to selected customers based on their support contract.

If you're interested in workload-based recommendations, reach out to your account team for more information.

The Azure Cost Optimization workbook serves as a centralized hub for some of the most-used tools that can help you drive utilization and efficiency goals. It offers a range of recommendations, including Advisor cost recommendations, identification of idle resources, and management of improperly deallocated VMs. It also provides insights into using Azure Hybrid Benefit options for Windows, Linux, and SQL databases.

To learn more, see Understand and optimize your Azure costs by using the Cost Optimization workbook.

Advisor now offers new recommendation reminders to help you proactively manage and improve the resilience and health of your workloads before an important event. Customers in the Azure Event Management (AEM) program are now reminded about outstanding recommendations for their subscriptions and resources that are critical for the event.

The event notifications are displayed when you visit Advisor or manage resources critical for an upcoming event. The reminders are displayed for events happening within the next 12 months and only for the subscriptions linked to an event. The notification includes a call to action to review outstanding recommendations for reliability, security, performance, and operational excellence.

Advisor now has a Reliability workbook template. The new workbook helps you identify areas of improvement by checking configuration of selected Azure resources by using the resiliency checklist and documented best practices. You can use filters, subscriptions, resource groups, and tags to focus on resources that you care about most. Use the workbook recommendations to:

• Optimize your workload.
• Prepare for an important event.
• Mitigate risks after an outage.

To learn more, see Optimize your resources for reliability.

Advisor data is now available in Azure Resource Graph in the Azure China and US Government clouds. Resource Graph is useful for customers who can now get recommendations for all their subscriptions at once and build custom views of Advisor recommendation data. For example, you can:

• Review your recommendations summarized by impact and category.
• See all recommendations for a recommendation type.
• View affected resource counts by recommendation category.

To learn more, see Query for Advisor data in Resource Graph Explorer (Azure Resource Graph).

Advisor now provides a Service Retirement workbook. It's important to be aware of the upcoming Azure service and feature retirements to understand their effect on your workloads and plan migration. The Service Retirement workbook provides a single centralized resource-level view of service retirements. It helps you assess impact, evaluate options, and plan migration. The workbook includes 35 services and features that are planned for retirement. You can view planned retirement dates and the list and map of affected resources. You also get information to take the necessary actions.

Advisor now provides the option to postpone or dismiss a recommendation for multiple resources at once. After you open a recommendations details page with a list of recommendations and associated resources, select the relevant resources and choose Postpone or Dismiss in the command bar at the top of the page.

To learn more, see Dismiss and postpone recommendations.

You can now improve the relevance of recommendations to make them more actionable to achieve more cost savings.

The right-sizing recommendations help optimize costs by identifying idle or underutilized VMs based on their CPU, memory, and network activity over the default lookback period of seven days. Now, with this latest update, you can adjust the default lookback period to get recommendations based on 14, 21, 30, 60, or even 90 days of use. The configuration can be applied at the subscription level. This capability is especially useful when the workloads have biweekly or monthly peaks (such as with payroll applications).

To learn more, see Optimize VM or virtual machine scale set spend by resizing or shutting down underutilized instances.

Advisor now provides more filtering capabilities. You can filter recommendations by resource group, resource type, impact, and workload.

It's easier now to get an overview of optimization opportunities available to your organization. There's no need to spend time and effort to apply filters and process subscriptions in batches.

To learn more, see Get started with Azure Advisor.

The Shut down/Resize your VMs recommendation was enhanced to increase quality, robustness, and applicability.

Improvements include:

• Cross-SKU family series resize recommendations are now available.
• Cross-version resize recommendations are now available. In general, newer versions of SKU families are more optimized, provide more features, and have better performance/cost ratios than older versions.
• Updated recommendation criteria include other SKU characteristics for better actionability. Examples are accelerated networking support, premium storage support, availability in a region, and inclusion in an availability set.

To learn more, read the How-to guide.