Optimizing your Azure costs can have a significant impact on your overall cloud spending. This comprehensive guide walks you through leveraging Azure Advisor recommendations to identify and address underutilized resources, ultimately helping you reduce your Azure costs.

Understand Cost Optimization Recommendations

Azure Advisor, integrated with Cost Management, provides valuable recommendations to help you optimize your Azure resource utilization and costs. These recommendations identify usage inefficiencies and potential savings opportunities.

The recommendations are categorized by their potential impact:

High Impact Recommendations:

  • Buy Azure Savings Plans to save on a variety of compute services
  • Purchase Reserved Virtual Machine Instances to reduce costs over pay-as-you-go
  • Resize or shut down underutilized virtual machines
  • Use Standard Storage for Managed Disks snapshots

Medium Impact Recommendations:

  • Eliminate un-provisioned ExpressRoute circuits
  • Delete or reconfigure idle virtual network gateways

By reviewing these recommendations and taking action, you can significantly reduce your Azure spending.

Act on Optimization Recommendations

Let’s walk through an example of resizing a virtual machine based on an Azure Advisor recommendation:

  1. View Recommendations: Open the desired scope in the Azure portal and navigate to the Advisor recommendations. This will show you a list of potential optimization opportunities.

  2. Verify VM Utilization: Select the “Right-size or shutdown underutilized virtual machines