Welcome to this Azure cost management video, which provides
a quick overview of advisor recommendations on how to
leverage it to optimize your cloud spend and maximize your
Azure investments. Azure makes it very easy to quickly build
and run complex cloud solutions. But it is very important these
solutions are optimized to minimize inefficiencies. Cost
Optimization is a continuous process and must be an integral
part of every IT organization that is running cloud solutions
in Azure. Under the optimization blade of the cost optimization
process, Azure Cost Management Advisor helps reduce your
overall Azure spend by identifying idle and
underutilized resources. Azure Cost Management leverages the
Azure Advisor service to provide cost optimization
recommendations by monitoring key cost metrics to the selected
scope. Based on the subscription scope selected for Cost
Optimization you can view cost Optimization Selections Act on
recommendations to select a cost effective option and verify the
action to ensure resource
optimization. The Azure Portal provides many ways to quickly
get to the cost Optimization Blade, you can click on the
advisor recommendations option in the cost management window to
get to the advisor recommendations page for the
selected scope. Another way to get to the same data is by
clicking on the advisor option in the main menu. And then
selecting the cost option in the main blade. You can also get to
the cost recommendations page by selecting either subscriptions
or the Resource Group you want to optimize from the main page
in the portal. And then clicking on advisor recommendations.
Depending on the scope selected recommendations for the
resources in those subscriptions or resources groups will be
displayed. Once in the Blade Azure Cost Management shows a
list of recommendations for the selected scope categorized by
their impact levels and potential yearly cost savings.
You can also download this data as CSV or PDF document. CSV files
for example, can be used as input into other tools like
power BI for further analysis. Recommendations range from
resizing a virtual machines to buying reservations to deleting
unused IP addresses
and express route circuits.The list of recommendations will
continue to grow as more Azure services are added overtime. Now
let's look at some of the recommendations from Azure in
more detail. Advisories indicating that some of the
virtual machines can be resized or even shut down to optimize
cost. Clicking into the utilization details for one of
the VMs, you can see the CPU utilization is below the 5%
threshold. You can also see other metrics like disk
utilization, and network traffic for this VM. Based on these
metrics, resource owners can choose to postpone these
recommendations or dismiss them or take the recommended action.
In this case, advisor is recommending that the virtual
machine currently running the workload is over provisioned and
can be resized to a smaller less expensive machine saving about
11,543 dollars a year. Similarly, advisor makes
recommendations for buying Azure reservations and when combined
with an offer like hybrid use benefits can help maximize
discounts. Advisor suggests
reserved instances, regions to buy these reservations in
quality and the VM skew and the potential savings. Clicking on
the buy reserved instance link brings you to the purchase
reservations blade where you can pick the specific VM skews
determine the payment plan and review and pay for these
reservations. In addition to providing recommendations on
virtual machines, Azure also provides recommendations on
deleting unused IP addresses, express route circuits and
provisioning optimal cosmos DB
request units. One of the key features of Azure Monitor along
with Azure Advisor Service is the ability to generate alerts for
resources based on specific utilization criteria. Whenever
Azure Monitor along with Azure Advisor detects a condition
that falls outside the criteria an alert is raised, and an
action can be performed based on that alert. For example, CPU
utilization for VMs staying below 10% can trigger an alert
and subsequent actions can follow. Alerts can be created
by clicking on the create alert button. The scope of the alert is
typically at the subscription level and optionally at the
resource group and can be specified for the resources that
you want to receive on the alert. You can also determine
the types of recommendations by using the category and impact
level options. The alert blade allows you to configure the
actions that will be triggered if the alert condition is met.
You can select from an existing Action Group or create a new or
custom Action Group. Actions can be as simple as sending
Emails or SMS notifications or running Azure Automation
Runbooks. All these actions can be configured in the Action
Group blade. For example, you can configure email
notifications to be sent to specific stakeholders when a
resource is being severely underutilized and informed the
resource owner to right size the resource to save costs.
In conclusion, Azure Cost Management's advisor
recommendation is a powerful tool for IT managers and
application owners to leverage in to optimize their Azure spend.
Advisor helps bring about key efficiencies in resource
utilization by providing stakeholders with specific
recommendations to ensure maximum utilization.
Additionally, using the built in advisor alerts mechanism,
recommendations related actions can be proactively taken to
guarantee cost optimizations. Thank you for watching and
please, see our
other videos in the Azure Cost Management channel on
YouTube and other Azure cost management related videos.