Microsoft cloud
Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor is a free, built-in recommendation service in the Azure portal that continuously analyses resource configuration and usage telemetry across a subscription and surfaces prioritised, actionable recommendations across five categories: cost, security, reliability, operational excellence, and performance.
Why Azure Advisor matters in a Microsoft estate
Azure Advisor matters because Microsoft 365, Azure, Windows 365, Teams, and related services are usually managed as one estate. The term connects to planning, cost, configuration, security, and day-two operational decisions across that estate.
How Azure Advisor shows up in practice
For cost specifically, the recommendations that matter most in practice are underutilised or idle virtual machines that Advisor identifies from actual CPU, memory, and network metrics over a rolling observation window, commonly recommending a smaller SKU or shutdown rather than manual guesswork. Other high-value recommendations include unattached managed disks left behind after a VM was deleted or resized, and reservation and savings plan purchase recommendations calculated from an organisation's own historical compute usage pattern. These reservation and savings plan recommendations can materially undercut pay-as-you-go pricing for workloads with predictable, steady-state consumption such as Azure Virtual Desktop session hosts or Windows 365-adjacent infrastructure. Each recommendation carries an estimated cost impact and, for many resource types, a one-click remediation action directly in the portal.
Larger changes such as reservation purchases or SKU family changes still require a deliberate decision, though, because they involve either a financial commitment or application-level testing before being safe to apply. Advisor's recommendations are generated from actual telemetry rather than static rules, which is both its strength and its main limitation. It is very good at flagging an obviously idle VM sitting at 2% CPU for thirty days, but it has no visibility into business context. It cannot distinguish a genuinely unused resource from a deliberately provisioned burst-capacity or disaster-recovery standby resource, so every recommendation still needs a human review pass before action, particularly around shutdown and rightsizing recommendations that could affect availability if applied blindly.
Advisor Score, a single aggregated percentage shown at the top of the Advisor dashboard, gives a quick directional read on how many of the available recommendations across all five categories an organisation has acted on. It is commonly used as a lightweight ongoing governance metric, tracked over time to show whether Azure hygiene is improving or drifting. It should be read alongside the underlying recommendation detail, though, rather than treated as a single pass/fail health indicator on its own. Because Advisor only sees what is running inside Azure subscriptions it has access to, and only evaluates telemetry rather than licence entitlement or Microsoft 365-level waste, it complements rather than replaces separate licence optimisation review. An estate can score well on Advisor cost recommendations while still carrying substantial unaddressed waste in M365 licence assignment that Advisor has no visibility into at all.