AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam

Overview of Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor is a free, personalized cloud consultant service. It continuously analyzes your Azure resource configurations and how you use them. Its purpose is to provide you with actionable best practices and recommendations to improve your overall cloud environment. These recommendations are organized into five key categories: Cost, Security, Reliability, Operational Excellence, and Performance.

You access Advisor through its dashboard in the Azure portal. Here, you can view all recommendations, filter them by category or resource type, and see which suggestions are the most critical. To stay informed, you can also set up Advisor alerts that notify you, such as by email, when new or important recommendations are generated. This helps you maintain continuous visibility into potential improvements.

Reliability and Performance Enhancements

Azure Advisor provides specific guidance to make your applications more available and faster. For reliability, it suggests designs that protect against failures. Common recommendations include enabling Availability Zones to guard against datacenter outages, configuring Azure Backup for critical data, and implementing virtual machine redundancy. These actions help ensure your services stay resilient and available to users.

For performance, Advisor analyzes how your resources are handling their workload. It then offers tuning suggestions to improve responsiveness. Examples include right-sizing underpowered or oversized virtual machines, optimizing disk settings for better speed, and scaling up App Service plans or SQL Database tiers when they are under heavy load. Implementing these tips helps your applications run efficiently even as demand changes.

Security Best Practices

The Security category in Azure Advisor focuses on strengthening your defenses against threats. It scans your environment for potential vulnerabilities and suggests industry-aligned fixes. Typical security recommendations include enforcing HTTPS and modern TLS versions to protect data in transit, enabling network protections like Azure DDoS Protection, and using Azure Bastion for secure access to virtual machines instead of exposing management ports directly to the internet.

These recommendations are dynamic and update as your resources change. By creating alerts for security suggestions, you can be notified immediately when Advisor identifies a new issue, such as a web app certificate that needs domain verification. This allows you to maintain a proactive security stance and address risks promptly before they can be exploited.

Cost Optimization Recommendations

A primary function of Azure Advisor is to help you reduce your Azure spending. Its cost category identifies resources that are not being used efficiently and suggests ways to save money. A very common recommendation is to right-size or shut down underutilized virtual machines that are consuming more compute resources than the workload requires.

Advisor also guides you toward smarter purchasing and storage choices. It may recommend buying Reserved Instances for virtual machines you plan to run long-term, which can offer significant savings compared to pay-as-you-go pricing. For storage, it can suggest moving older, rarely accessed backup data to a lower-cost archive tier or adjusting redundancy levels to better match your availability needs with your budget.

Operational Excellence

Operational excellence recommendations help you streamline management and improve efficiency through automation and consistent practices. Azure Advisor suggests strategies to reduce manual effort and enforce governance. Key examples include setting up Auto-Scale so your applications can automatically add or remove resources based on demand, implementing standardized backup policies, and using Azure Policy to apply organizational rules across all your resources.

Advisor integrates with other Azure management tools to support these best practices. You can view its recommendations within Azure Monitor dashboards and use Log Analytics to investigate the underlying data. This integration creates a feedback loop: monitoring tools provide the performance and health data, and Advisor analyzes that data to suggest specific operational improvements, helping you manage your environment proactively.