>> Hey friends, Azure Advisor is
like having your own Cloud expert,
keeping an eye on all of your resources.
It's constantly looking for issues with security,
reliability, cost, performance, and operational excellence.
These are all pillars of the Azure Well-Architected Framework.
Jose Portugal is here to show the
latest about this service that keeps getting smarter,
today on Azure Friday.
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>> Hey friends, I'm Scott Hanselman,
and it's Azure Friday.
I'm here with Jose Portugal,
and we're talking about Azure Advisor.
I've actually noticed the Azure Advisor.
It's in my portal,
and it gives me all information about what's going on,
recommendations and security, and it just gets better and better.
It has different features each month.
>> That is correct, Scott.
We do keep working on adding recommendations constantly.
We're always getting feedback from our customers.
We're always looking for other ways to delight them.
So you keep an eye on Azure Advisor,
you will see that our catalog keeps going
and the ways we try to help our customers as well.
>> The catalog is in the hundreds now.
It's many hundreds; 500 plus recommendations.
>> Yes. We have more than 500 recommendations.
We work with more than a hundred groups
within Azure that give us telemetry.
We look into basically the uses you have for your resources.
We keep always an eye, and we're always looking
into adding additional recommendations to that set.
>> You're not trying to upsell me?
These aren't recommendations like,
"You should spend more money."
These are recommendations to help you
to make the product more secure,
or to make your product running more smoothly.
>> Correct. Yeah, most of
our recommendations are security performance,
it's a [inaudible]. But we do even have the cost-savings category.
We're not trying to actually upsell you.
We're trying to save our customers money.
Obviously, some of our recommendations might
be adding or increase capacity, etc.
which obviously comes with the cost,
but obviously, that's always up to the customer.
We always base it on the users,
we give them recommendations.
But yeah, we're always trying to improve the resource status,
and also, to save them money in the process that we can.
>> Yes, I really liked that the
last time I looked at Azure Advisor,
there's actually a cost section that was recommending that I
lower some virtual machines that were
not working very hard to a different-
>> Correct.
>> To save me money. Like things that you've
forgotten or resources that you may have forgotten;
yes, it definitely helps a lot.
Maybe you can show us what this looks like.
>> Okay, let me go ahead and share my screen.
The first thing I'm going to show you,
how to get to Azure Advisor,
just in case for people who don't know how to find it.
You can find Azure Advisor by coming to our portal,
and then in the menu,
you can find [inaudible] the Advisor,
or you can also always come directly and
type "Advisor" on the research bar,
and you will find it over here.
This is the Azure Advisor portal.
As you can see here are
plenty of the recommendations we talked about.
We have the five categories,
which are the pillars or the framework.
You will find recommendations that
are in the "Cost Savings" category,
on the "Security" category, also,
"Reliability", "Operational Excellence", and "Performance".
As you can see, it will tell you,
for example, for Cost Savings,
you can have at the glimpse
how much savings you can get by following these recommendations.
You will see about how many recommendations per category you have,
how many impacted resources, and also,
the priority or the importance of
those recommendations that we have for you.
Now, let me show you what it looks like when you go
into a specific category to see new recommendations.
For example, in this case,
I have selected more than half of my subscriptions.
You can compute and change the subscriptions to
which you want to see your recommendations.
I have the recommendations for these set of subscriptions.
We have an impact of resources,
almost per [inaudible] , like a potential yearly savings.
The recommendation list, you can find over here would impact it's
description potential yearly savings
for the category cost savings,
and the impact of resources.
You can also come in there,
and then, you will see the details about your recommendation.
In this case, for example,
it's suggesting to me that I resize my SQL databases to save
some resources based on the
usage of them having of those databases.
Another thing that you can see is it will
tell you which subscription views it belongs to,
the additional details [inaudible] ,
and you can take different actions.
You can go and see the resource directly to see what it's about.
You can see what the recommended actions
by the recommendation is, like in this case,
for example, if I click on it,
it'll bring me directly to the place where I
can take action on that specific recommendation.
Another thing that you can do, as well,
is in the case that at this moment, for example,
you don't really care about this recommendation,
or you think it's okay,
you can always postpone it,
and this recommendation will come back to you later.
Or you can just flat out dismiss it.
This is, for example,
a research you don't care much about.
It's like one or two test resources.
It's just something that you are trying out,
you can come up and then dismiss the recommendation,
and then we will stop showing that to you.
That is basically the gist of how recommendations work.
I can show you, as well, for example,
like for other categories,
like Security, it's an important one.
In Security, we work very closely with Azure Security Center,
so the recommendation that you see here
will match also what you will see on Security Center.
Okay. Now, I will show you a little bit
about a couple of other features that you can
use to keep up-to-date
with the recommendations that Advisor has calculated for you.
A few of the things that we have is you can
download a full PDF for all the recommendations we have for you.
If you need to keep reports or you want to
share it with somebody in a more friendly way,
you can download a list as a PDF or a CSV as well.
A couple of other features that we have been adding is,
for example, the ability for you to have alerts.
You can come to Advisor alerts,
you can create your own alerts in which you come and tell us,
basically, which subscriptions, the resource
groups that you want the alerts to be working for.
You can make a few configurations about the category,
the impact level, the recommendation type.
You select your action group,
and then you can create the name and create the alert.
Then, any time that a specific recommendation
that matches what you have selected comes up,
you will get alerted about it.
One more thing that I want to show you, as well,
is how you can work with "Recommendation Digests".
Sometimes, you have multiple subscriptions, multiple resources,
it's not very easy for
people to keep an eye on all the resources at one time.
Another thing you can do is you can come and
create new recommendation digests.
On the same band of the alerts you can come,
you tell us a few parameters like how
often do you want these digests to come to you?
Either weekly, biweekly, monthly.
You can tell us about which categories you care about,
and you can select one of
the multiple languages that Azure support.
After you fill those details,
you will start getting in that frequency,
basically, a ready digest for you to
look into what the status is for your recommendations.
>> Are you saying that it'll send me the digest in a report like,
"Hey, you haven't been to Azure Advisor in a while.
Take a look, there's new stuff for you."
It's almost like a newsletter of advice.
>> That is correct. You can create your own newsletter,
it will be like your own frequency.
We don't like spamming people.
We don't like spam. You compute, you configure it.
You make it like feed
your parameters with things that you cared most about,
and that is what we will be
sending you on the frequency that you have.
You can always come back in
here for a specific digest you have.
You can enable it, disable it, modify the frequency,
whatever works best for you is what you should get.
Now, let me go into our latest fit, your [inaudible] ,
I want to show you guys,
so this is Advisory Score.
One of the common feedback that we get is,
for many of our customers,
you have multiple subscriptions,
doses of them, you can have hundreds of resources.
Sometimes, it's complicated to keep a track
of all those recommendations,
which ones mattered the most?
What is the actual status of my Azure resources?
How am I doing? That's a question
we get very often, how am I doing?
This that I presented [inaudible] ,
is like a score.
Basically, it takes all
the recommendations for the subscription you
have selected and then calculates a simple number,
like 0-100 that gives you a good idea of
how are you doing in each one of the categories that we have.
Each one of the five pillars will have its own score around here.
You can say, for example, I'm
doing great on operational excellence,
doing great on performance,
I should probably take a look at my security recommendations.
There's some room for improvement here,
and also I should probably take a look at my Cost savings,
see there's some potential savings.
Also, it provides you with a trend line of how are you doing,
and how have you been improving over time. Any changes.
You can see over here,
what has been your score for the past couple of months,
you can also come over here and select and
change what is the granularity
of the trend line you want to look at.
Again, with this, it's the same sub-set of recommendations.
This is just a new experience that we
are providing to our customers
to give them a single place where they can come and at a glimpse,
look at and say, "Hey these are
the categories that I am most interested in.
These are the ones Advisor thinks I should take a deeper look at."
You can come again and look at
your recommendations directly by clicking on the categories.
You will see them over here,
and just as you have them here,
you will see also an additional column that will tell
you for a specific recommendation,
what is the specific impact,
or what is the score impact that you
would see if you resolve that recommendation.
That's one of the things that has been working very well lately.
Now, it's very easy for us to see.
Let's sort our recommendations by the ones that have
the biggest impact in my score.
All of these impacts is obviously calculated on the Advisor side,
we work with many teams to do weights on the recommendations,
to analyze the usage,
and to come up with what is
the best way for us to improve those scores.
Biggest improvement on the score
means a bigger weight on the recommendation,
means that we think you should look
into those recommendations first.
>> This is almost like your credit score,
except they're telling you exactly how
your credit score will be affected
by your behavior, which they don't tell you.
It's not an opaque score, it's very transparent.
>> Correct. It is very transparent.
We tell you exactly where you're at right now.
Basically, how will you
improve with every specific action that you take,
and obviously, it reflects directly.
If you take a look at the gap
or the impact that you have missing to get to 100,
you can compute recommendations and you can
see that once you start adding the numbers,
they will add and bring you up to 100,
that is the experience.
Advisor Score is already available for
people if they don't like Advisor Portal,
so please, feel free to take a look.
We always love hearing back from our customers.
You will see that we have our feedback buttons enabled.
We keep a close eye on that feedback.
We're always trying to be active on those things,
and take care of the issues that our customers report,
and things they care about
to keep improving Advisor and Advisory Score;
like adding more features,
more functionality,
anything we can do to try to make their life easy.
>> That's actually a really good reminder for Azure in general.
I appreciate that you brought that up because there's
a real human being on
the other side of those feedback forums
and you're one of those human beings.
When people want to learn more about Azure Advisor,
where they want to share their opinions about the product,
you and your team are on the other side making it better for them.
>> That is correct. We read those on a weekly basis one by one.
We just go [inaudible] like humans.
The team, actually together,
we go through our feedback and we're always looking.
Some of our best ideas we have
gotten from customers that provide feedback,
and we look forward to keep getting that feedback for sure.
>> Fantastic. Now do people have this now?
There may be people who are watching Azure Friday,
they've been watching for years, they didn't
know Azure Advisor exists.
Do they have to sign up for
anything or they just go straight to it in the portal?
>> No. You can go straight to it on the portal.
It's available for everybody.
This is a free service.
Everybody with an Azure subscription can get access to Advisor.
By all means, it's already live for
both Advisor and Advisor Score.
You can just go directly to your portal and start
benefiting and start looking into how
to improve all of your Azure resource management in here.
>> Fantastic. This is great.
I'm going to go and re-explore my scores.
I think I may actually set up that weekly email because I
would love to have a digest of things that I
may have missed in the past.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> Fantastic. I am learning all about Azure Advisor,
your one-stop place for
Azure best practices today on Azure Friday.
Hey, thanks for watching this episode of Azure Friday.
Now I need you to like it, comment on it,
tell your friends, retweet it,
watch more Azure Friday.
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