Azure Advisor and Service Health
Azure Advisor is your free cloud consultant — giving personalised recommendations. Azure Service Health tells you when Azure itself has problems.
Your cloud helpers
Azure Advisor = a free personal consultant who reviews your Azure setup and says “Hey, you’re paying for this VM but barely using it. Downsize it and save $50/month.” It gives personalised recommendations across five categories.
Azure Service Health = the traffic report for Azure. It tells you when Azure services have issues, when planned maintenance is coming, and when something might affect YOUR specific resources. Like knowing there’s roadwork on your commute route.
Azure Advisor — personalised recommendations
Advisor analyses your Azure environment and provides recommendations across five categories:
| Category | What It Recommends | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Reliability | Make your apps more resilient | ”Add a second VM for high availability” |
| Security | Reduce vulnerabilities | ”Enable MFA for admin accounts” |
| Performance | Improve speed and responsiveness | ”Upgrade this SQL Database tier — it’s maxing out” |
| Cost | Reduce spending | ”This VM is underutilised — downsize or deallocate” |
| Operational Excellence | Improve management practices | ”Enable diagnostic logging on your App Service” |
How Peak Roasters uses Advisor
When Peak Roasters opens Advisor, they see:
- Cost: “Your B2s VM averages 5% CPU usage. Consider downsizing to B1s — save $15/month.”
- Security: “Enable MFA for 3 admin accounts that don’t have it.”
- Reliability: “Your SQL Database has no geo-redundancy. Consider enabling geo-replication.”
Key concept: Advisor recommendations are FREE and personalised to YOUR resources. They’re not generic tips — Advisor analyses your actual usage data.
Advisor Score
Advisor provides an Advisor Score (percentage) showing how well you follow best practices in each category. It’s similar to Defender for Cloud’s Secure Score but broader — covering cost, performance, and reliability too.
Exam tip: Don’t confuse Advisor Score (overall best practices) with Secure Score (security posture in Defender for Cloud).
Azure Service Health
Service Health is a dashboard that shows you the health of Azure services relevant to YOUR environment:
Three components
| Component | What It Shows | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Service Issues | Current outages affecting Azure services you use | ”Azure SQL Database in Australia East is experiencing degraded performance” |
| Planned Maintenance | Upcoming maintenance that may affect you | ”VMs in Australia East will have maintenance on Saturday” |
| Health Advisories | Changes that could affect your resources | ”TLS 1.0 is being deprecated — update your apps” |
How it’s different from Azure Status
| Azure Status Page | Azure Service Health |
|---|---|
| Shows ALL Azure issues globally | Shows only issues affecting YOUR resources |
| Public webpage (status.azure.com) | In the Azure portal, personalised |
| No notifications | Configurable alerts and notifications |
Summit Construction configures Service Health alerts for their production subscription. If any Azure service they use in Australia East has an issue, the IT manager gets an email and Teams notification immediately.
Exam tip: Advisor vs Service Health vs Monitor
These three services are easy to confuse:
- Azure Advisor — “How can I improve my Azure environment?” (recommendations for cost, security, reliability, performance)
- Azure Service Health — “Is Azure itself healthy?” (outages, maintenance, advisories)
- Azure Monitor — “How are MY resources performing?” (metrics, logs, alerts for your resources)
Quick test: Advisor = recommendations. Service Health = Azure’s health. Monitor = your resources’ health.
🎬 Video walkthrough
Flashcards
Knowledge Check
Peak Roasters opens Azure Advisor and sees a recommendation to downsize their VM. This recommendation is based on what?
Summit Construction wants to know if any planned Azure maintenance will affect their production VMs next week. Where should they look?
Next up: Azure Monitor — the comprehensive monitoring platform for all your Azure resources.