Crisp answer: Azure Advisor is a personalised recommendation engine that analyses your Azure usage and configuration, then suggests improvements across five categories: Cost, Security, Reliability, Operational Excellence, and Performance.
The five categories:
Cost:
- Right-size or shut down underutilised VMs
- Delete unattached managed disks
- Buy Reserved Instances for steady-state workloads
- Delete idle application gateways and load balancers
Security:
- Pulls recommendations from Defender for Cloud
- Enable MFA, apply Just-In-Time VM access, enable disk encryption
Reliability:
- Add availability sets or zones
- Enable soft delete on Key Vault
- Configure backup on VMs
- Deploy across multiple regions for critical workloads
Operational Excellence:
- Enable Azure Monitor and alerts
- Apply resource tags consistently
- Upgrade deprecated API versions
- Enable diagnostic logs
Performance:
- Use Premium SSD for production VMs
- Enable Accelerated Networking
- Scale out App Service plans
- Enable CDN for storage accounts
How to action recommendations:
# List all Advisor recommendations
az advisor recommendation list --output table
# Filter by category
az advisor recommendation list --category Cost --output table
# Get recommendation details
az advisor recommendation list \
--query "[?category=='Cost'].{Resource:resourceMetadata.resourceId, Impact:impact, Savings:extendedProperties.annualSavingsAmount}" \
--output table
In the portal: Advisor shows potential monthly savings for Cost recommendations. Reviewing Advisor weekly as part of a FinOps cadence and tracking which recommendations have been actioned is best practice.
What to say in the interview:
"I use Azure Advisor as my starting point for cost and reliability reviews. For cost specifically, I look at the right-sizing recommendations and cross-reference with actual utilisation in Azure Monitor before acting — Advisor sometimes flags VMs as underutilised that have predictable burst patterns. For Reserved Instances I export the Advisor RI recommendations, validate against the workload roadmap, and purchase one-year reservations for anything running 24/7."