Azure Advisor: Key Performance Recommendations to Enhance Your Cloud

Staying on top of your Azure environment can be a busy job. 

There’s always something that could be tweaked, updated, or secured—and that’s before you even think about optimising costs. 

This is where Azure Advisor can help. It’s Microsoft’s built-in digital consultant that’s a bit like having a cloud expert peering over your shoulder 24/7 (in a helpful way, of course). 

While we’ve previously explored how Azure Advisor can help cut unnecessary costs, there’s so much more to this powerful tool than just saving a few quid. Today, we’re taking a deeper dive into how Azure Advisor can improve performance across your entire Azure estate.

At its core, Azure Advisor is a personalised recommendation service that analyses your Azure resource configuration and usage telemetry. It’s a sort of virtual consultant that never sleeps, constantly scanning your environment for ways to improve. 

Unlike many third-party tools that do similar things, Azure Advisor is built directly into the Azure platform—so there’s nothing to install, no agents to deploy, and no extra costs to worry about. It’s already there, just waiting for you to take advantage of its insights. 

Azure Advisor works by continually monitoring your resources and comparing your configuration against Microsoft’s best practices and usage patterns. When it spots an opportunity for improvement, it generates a recommendation complete with potential impact assessment and implementation instructions.

Many people ask about the difference between Azure Monitor and Azure Advisor, and it’s a fair question—both services aim to improve your Azure cloud environment, but they approach it from different angles. 

Azure Monitor is primarily about observability—collecting, analysing, and acting on telemetry data from your Azure environment. It’s focused on what’s happening right now and alerting you to issues as they occur. 

Azure Advisor, meanwhile, is about optimisation—analysing your configuration and usage patterns to recommend improvements. It’s more concerned with what you could be doing better based on historical patterns and best practices. 

Think of Azure Monitor as your watchful guardian and Azure Advisor as your strategic consultant.

When to use which service 

Both services serve different purposes in your cloud management strategy. It’s fine to use both! 

Use Azure Monitor when you need to: 

• Track performance metrics in real-time 
• Set up alerts for critical thresholds 
• Diagnose issues that are actively affecting your services
• Visualise operational data through dashboards 
• Log and analyse system behaviour 

⠀Use Azure Advisor when you want to: 

• Optimise resource configuration for better performance 
• Identify security vulnerabilities before they’re exploited 
• Reduce unnecessary cloud spending 
• Improve application reliability and resilience 
• Implement operational best practices 

In practice, we find these tools work best in tandem. Generally, Monitor keeps you informed about what’s happening now, while Advisor helps you improve your cloud infrastructure for tomorrow and beyond—although there are some overlaps.  

Azure Advisor doesn’t just focus on one aspect of your cloud environment—it takes a holistic view across five critical areas of cloud optimisation: 

1) Cost: Making sure you’re not wasting money 

We’ve covered this extensively in our dedicated guide to cutting costs with Azure Advisor, but in brief, Advisor helps identify idle and underutilised resources, recommends Reserved Instances where appropriate, and suggests ways to optimise your storage expenses. 

If you’re looking to dive deeper into Azure pricing, our guides on breaking down Microsoft Azure pricing and the Azure Pricing Calculator should help. Both of those are great for the pre-purchase stage, when you’re investigating what things might cost in future. 

We’ve also got specific advice if your Azure Virtual Desktop costs are spiralling or if you want to avoid common cloud cost mistakes. 

2) Security: Keeping cyber threats at bay 

Azure Advisor gives you security recommendations that help protect your applications and data from threats. 

These recommendations might include things like: 

• Applying encryption for data at rest 
• Implementing just-in-time VM access 
• Fixing vulnerabilities in SQL databases or virtual machines 
• Enabling Azure Defender for comprehensive protection 
• Adding web application firewalls to your resources 

 What makes these recommendations particularly valuable is that they’re contextual to your specific environment. Advisor doesn’t just tell you to “be more secure”—it shows you the exact resources that need attention and explains precisely what to do. 

For example, rather than a generic suggestion to “ensure your VMs are protected,” Advisor might tell you, “VM-PROD-SQL-01 has no backup policy configured, leaving it vulnerable to data loss. Click here to implement Azure Backup.” From there, you can investigate yourself, and decide whether to take action or not. 

3) Reliability: When staying online is non-negotiable 

Few things damage customer trust faster than unreliable services. Azure Advisor’s reliability recommendations help make sure your applications remain available and resilient, even when something unexpected happens. 

Typical reliability recommendations might look like: 

• Configuring Traffic Manager endpoints for failover
• Setting up geo-redundant storage for critical data 
• Implementing availability zones or availability sets for VMs 
• Configuring automatic failover for Azure SQL databases 
• Making sure critical resources have appropriate disaster recovery options 

For many Azure customers, these recommendations can be eye-openers—revealing single points of failure they might be completely unaware of. Left ignored, they can cause major problems down the line. 

4) Performance: Speeding things up 

Performance issues can be tricky to diagnose, especially in complex cloud environments. Azure Advisor helps identify potential bottlenecks and suggests how you might speed things up. 

It might recommend upgrading to premium storage for those workloads that are particularly I/O-intensive, giving your apps that extra boost when reading and writing data. 

For database-heavy applications, it might suggest implementing Azure Cache for Redis, which can dramatically reduce database load by storing frequently-accessed data in memory. SQL performance is another area where Advisor shines, offering specific query optimisation suggestions that can transform database response times. 

For web apps facing increased traffic, Advisor typically recommends appropriate App Service plan upgrades before you experience slowdowns rather than after customers complain. It might also suggest configuring content delivery networks for those applications with a global audience, making sure users get speedy access regardless of their location. 

5) Operational excellence: Best practices 

Running a tight ship in the cloud requires attention to detail and adherence to best practices. Azure Advisor’s operational excellence recommendations help you maintain a well-managed environment. 

Advisor frequently suggests setting up service health alerts so you’re promptly informed about any Azure service issues that might affect your workloads. It also shows the importance of implementing consistent resource tagging for better management—something that pays off when you’re trying to allocate costs, or identify resource owners, months down the line. 

For easier troubleshooting when things go pear-shaped, Advisor often recommends setting up diagnostic logs across your critical services. These logs can save hours of head-scratching when you’re investigating things that’ve gone wrong. 

Beyond basic monitoring, Advisor might suggest creating specific Azure Service Health alerts tailored to your most business-critical resources, so you’re first to know about potential problems. For those routine but necessary maintenance tasks, it typically recommends setting up automated runbooks, freeing your team from repetitive work. 

We know it’s less glamorous than other categories, but these recommendations can really deliver consistent long-term benefits in your operations. Definitely worth doing. 

Having all these recommendations at your fingertips is brilliant, but the real value comes from putting them into practice. Here’s our approach to getting the most from Azure Advisor: 

Getting started with minimal fuss 

1. Access Azure Advisor – Simply navigate to the Advisor service in the Azure portal. There’s no setup required—it’s already analysing your resources.  
2. Review your dashboard – Advisor presents a summary of recommendations across all five categories, with impact levels to help you prioritise.  
3. Filter its recommendations – Use the built-in filters to focus on specific subscriptions, resource groups, or recommendation types.  
4. Understand the details – For each recommendation, Advisor provides a description, potential impact, and specific steps for implementation. 

Prioritise recommendations that matter to you 

Not all recommendations are created equal—and what’s urgent for one business might be trivial for another. We recommend prioritising based on: 

• Business impact – Focus first on recommendations that affect mission-critical workloads 
• Implementation effort – Start with “quick wins” that deliver value for minimal effort 
• Cost savings – If budget’s tight, prioritise recommendations with clear financial benefits 
• Security risks – Always prioritise high-impact security recommendations 

It’s also worth noting that some recommendations might not be appropriate for your specific scenario. For instance, Advisor might suggest downsizing a VM that looks to be underutilised, not knowing that it handles critical batch processing once a month. 

This is why you need humans in the loop—use your judgment and look at business context when evaluating the recommendations. 

Acting on your Azure Advisor recommendations is usually a great idea, but how do you know they’re actually making a difference? This is where Advisor Score comes in—a powerful feature that serves as your optimisation compass. 

How Advisor Score works 

Advisor Score is a percentage-based measurement system that shows how well your Azure environment follows industry best practices. 

A score of 100% in any category means all your resources assessed by Advisor are aligned with best practices (as defined by Microsoft). Conversely, a score of 0% indicates none of your resources follow Advisor’s recommendations. 

What makes Advisor Score particularly useful is how it’s broken down. You’ll see: 

• An overall Advisor Score that gives you a high-level view of your optimisation state 
• Individual category scores for each of the five Advisor recommendation areas 
• Historical trends showing your progress over daily, weekly, and monthly periods 

Each score is calculated based on the resources that Advisor actually assesses. If Advisor hasn’t evaluated certain resources yet (which can happen), those resources won’t affect your score either positively or negatively. 

How the Azure Advisor Score is calculated 

While the maths behind Advisor Score can get quite detailed, here’s a simplified ex planation of how it works: 

For your overall Advisor Score, Azure essentially takes a weighted average of your five category scores. The weighting accounts for how many resources are applicable to each category and their relative importance. 

For individual category scores, the calculation varies by category: 

• Cost Score: Calculated based on the retail cost of assessed resources and the ratio of healthy to unhealthy resources. Recommendations with greater impact are weighted more heavily, as are long-standing issues. 
• Security Score: Uses Microsoft’s Secure Score model that evaluates your security posture. 
• Reliability, Performance, and Operational Excellence Scores: These use a subcategory-based approach where recommendations are grouped into logical areas, each with their own weighting. For example, in the Reliability category, High Availability recommendations carry more weight than Monitoring recommendations. 

What’s particularly clever about this approach is that it helps you prioritise your efforts. The recommendations that will boost your score the most tend to be both high-impact and relatively straightforward to implement. 

Getting actionable insights from your score 

When you view your Advisor Score in the Azure portal, you’ll notice each recommendation shows a “Potential score increase” value. This tells you exactly how many percentage points your category score will improve if you implement that specific recommendation. 

Let’s say your Reliability score is currently 75% and a recommendation shows a potential score increase of 3%. Implementing that recommendation would boost your Reliability score to 78%. (Obviously—but small bumps like this definitely add up). 

It’s a good way to identify the “quick wins” that will give you the biggest score improvements for your effort. 

Some recommendations might show a dash (−) in the impact column, which typically means it’s a newer recommendation that hasn’t yet been incorporated into the scoring model. After a short evaluation period (usually a few weeks), these will be included. 

Making the most of your Advisor Score 

Every business is different, of course, but there are a few general strategies for anyone making use of Advisor Score: 

1. Find your baseline: Before making any changes, note your current scores across all categories.  
2. Focus on high-impact recommendations: Sort recommendations by “Potential score increase” and tackle the highest-impact items first.  
3. Set realistic targets: Rather than aiming for 100% across the board immediately, set progressive targets like “Improve Security score from 65% to 80% this quarter.”  
4. Regularly review trends: The score history graphs help you visualise your progress over time and confirm whether your optimisations are having the desired effect. 
5. Handle irrelevant recommendations: If a recommendation doesn’t apply to your specific scenario, use the ‘dismiss’ feature rather than leaving it unaddressed. This removes it from your score calculation and helps Microsoft refine their recommendation engine. 

Teams who actively monitor their Advisor Score tend to maintain better optimised Azure environments. It transforms cloud optimisation from a nebulous goal to a measurable, achievable metric. It’s something that teams can rally around and demonstrate progress on. 

At Synextra, we know that cloud optimisation is an ongoing journey, not a one-time event. While Azure Advisor gives great recommendations, putting them into practice does take expertise, time, and context that some IT teams often struggle to find. 

As a boutique cloud MSP specialising in Azure, we offer a more personal approach than the corporate giants. Our team brings the human touch to cloud management, so you can enjoy a really well-optimised Azure stack without adding to your workload. 

Get in touch today if you’d like to know more. Our friendly team of Azure experts can help you cut through the complexity and focus on the things that’ll make a real difference to your business.