>> Hey. Good news. We're here with
Irina and Sven-Erik to talk about how to
supercharge your advisor recommendations and
advisor score using tagging. Join us.
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>> Hey, welcome to the Azure Enablement Show,
where we'll be discussing the challenges
you and our other tech-savvy customers have encountered.
Together, we're going to talk with experts to
find out how they think about these problems,
recommended tools and best practices,
and tips they've learned from
years of experience that you can use.
Today we're going to be talking about how
Azure Advisor can be supercharged with workload tagging.
After you watch this video,
I suggest you check out the resources and
other links that we've shared in the show notes below.
Do you want to ask a question or leave a comment?
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The question I have today I think would probably be best
to answer through customer load.
Let me switch to being a customer.
Hey, here I am,
Sven-Erik it's so good to see you.
I have this problem that my org has been struggling with,
and I'm wondering if you have a moment to just
help me through. Help me think about it.
>> Yeah, let's do it.
>> Cool. We have
a pretty large Azure presence and one of the things that
we like to use with Azure is this Azure Advisor thing.
There's that service that Azure provides where it
looks at your running resources and tries to
give you some tips or advice on how to better use them,
how to fix things, how to make things move smoothly.
The tricky thing is because we've got so much stuff,
we've been having trouble trying to understand a couple of things.
One of the things is there is this thing called Advisor
Score that I'd love to hear a little bit more about.
Then how do we handle
the scale of all these recommendations that we have?
Can we take both of these things? I don't know.
Maybe we start with you Sven-Erik
about the score stuff and then Irina,
I want to ask you about what to do about
the scale thing we've got.
>> Sure. I'd be happy too, David.
Advisor Score helps you understand
exactly what part of your Azure state is healthy versus unhealthy.
What we mean by healthy is you don't have
any outstanding recommendations from
the Advisor that you need to take.
It really helps you understand your degree of health,
how that health is changing over time,
and which specific recommendations you should go target
and resolve to maximize impact of the recommendations.
>> Cool. Now I know what that number means and represents.
What do I do about the fact that I have
a bunch of recommendations and I don't
always know what the recommendations are reference to?
Is it this project? Is it that project?
What can I do about that?
>> Sure. The customer can always have a lot of
Azure resources deployed and it's so difficult to understand,
what is a sandbox environment?
What is your production environment,
which team owns what?
It's just difficult.
It's a lot of time and effort for you to go and analyze it.
What you can use right now is you can use tags issue assigned
previously to your Azure resources and you can
filter recommendations using these tags.
This way you can focus on
the recommendations which are most impactful for you.
Let's say you have a business-critical application
and you only would like to optimize that one.
This is where tag filtering comes in.
>> Cool. I can set tags on my resources,
I can filter on them.
Are there best practices for what tags I should use?
What should I call them?
Or any systems?
Do I just call it Bob, Susan, Fred?
Because I've got Bob, Susan, Fred, and my team are like,
what does Microsoft suggest for how to organize and think about
what ways and what tags to put out on my resources.
>> Well, architecture framework does
a great job here defining the guidance for you,
how you should go about tagging.
One way to think about talking is who owns these resources?
This is where you will tag a team or business unit.
You can also tag
your resources related to which application is enabled.
Let's say this is an ERP application.
This is a website.
This is internal application for managing something.
That's how you use it.
>> That makes sense. What this
is going to allow me to do is say, hey,
show me the recommendations
associated with my production environment
or show me the information about my website.
That's going to make things so much easier.
The thing I'm a little concerned about now,
though, is tag sounds.
Great. We're going to go Tag Happy
and we're going to have tags for.
We're going to have so many tags that they're going to go over.
Is there any way to make sure that we're staying consistent?
Because everybody can make up their own tags.
How do we handle that?
Maybe Sven-Erik you have an idea on that?
>> Yeah, that's a great question, David.
It's true. You can go absolutely wild with tags.
One of the best ways to make sure that you tag
your resources with descriptive and helpful tags and
consistently tag them is to use Azure policy that helps you
govern and to ensure that resources are consistently applied.
The tags are consistently applied across resources.
>> It would be possible to have it.
Make sure you can only apply to
certain tags or maybe auto-apply tags and that stuff.
Therefore, people aren't just thinking like,
oh, should I call this web or website.
>> That's right. Out-of-the-point tag is one of
the most common ways our users and
customers apply Azure policy to be
consistent with their tagging policy's approaches.
>> I am a visual learner.
Is there any chance I could get
a sense of what this stuff looks like in action?
>> Yeah, absolutely, David.
I'll be happy to walk you through a couple of screenshots here.
What you see in your screen right now is
the current advisor experience.
What it helps you understand is
what you're all up Advisor's Score.
What percentage of your resources effectively are healthy?
How is that changed over time?
Importantly, how are you doing in each of
the five dimensions of the well-architected framework?
Cost, security,
reliability, operational excellence, and performance?
What you don't have here, though,
is a specific sense of
which specific impacted resources
should you go address to ensure the health of a given workload?
That's where resource tags applying those filters comes in.
I'm going to share another screen here.
In this second screen, you can see how the picture
changes when you apply a combination of resource tags to
better filter down your Advisor Score and
the associated recommendations and
resources affected by those resources.
In this particular scenario,
we've applied three resource tag filters.
First, business criticality is high.
Second, team is equal MSDS.
It's a notional team name.
Third, environment is production.
What this allows us to do is zoom in on
only those production resources that
are business-critical and associate with a specific team.
When we do that, the picture changes quite a bit.
Now, instead of looking at over 53
storage accounts down on the lower hand of the pane,
as we saw with the earlier pre-filtered example,
we now know there are actually
only four specific storage accounts that really affect
the Advisor Score for this particular set
of resources defined by these resource tags.
This really shows how you can take
Advisor Scores to the next level by zooming in.
This improves action ability.
>> I think this gives me a place to go and a thing to start doing.
I now have renewed interest in making
sure that we're tagging super
well and using it in an advisor context.
I think I'm going to switch back to host mode
here. Back as a host.
I'd like to thank you,
Irina and Sven-Erik for taking the time to talk to me about this.
I'd like to thank all of you at home who are watching this.
I hope it was useful to you,
and I hope you'll join us again in
another episode of the Azure Enablement Show.
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