Two ways to share Azure Advisor recommendations

If your IT organization is like most, you probably work with many different people across many different teams. When it comes to common IT tasks like optimizing your cloud workloads, you might need to interact with several resource owners or even complete a formal review process.

That’s why with Azure Advisor, we’ve made it easy to share recommendations with other people across your teams so you can follow best practices that help you get the most out of Azure. Advisor is a free Azure service that helps you optimize your Azure resources for high availability, security, performance, and cost by providing personalized recommendations based on your usage and configurations.

Here are two ways you can share your Advisor best practice recommendations with your teams.

1. Export a PDF or CSV of your Advisor recommendations

Probably the simplest way to share your Advisor recommendations is by exporting an Advisor recommendation report as a PDF or CSV through the Advisor UI in the Azure portal.

This report shows a summary of your Advisor recommendations by category, subscription, and potential business impact. Then you can easily share it with other teams so the resource owners can take action and optimize their resources for high availability, security, performance, and cost.

If you want to provide a specific view of a subset of your recommendations, you can use the UI filters or drill down into specific categories and recommendations. The recommendation report will only contain what you see on the screen when you generate it, which can help you focus on the most critical optimizations.

2. Use the Advisor API to integrate with your ticketing system or dashboards

The other way to share your Advisor recommendations with other people in your organization is via the Advisor REST API. Using this API, you can connect Advisor with your organization’s ticketing system and assign remediation work, set up an internal working dashboard your teams can review and action, or leverage Advisor’s recommendation data any way you choose.

The visual above shows just one way you can use the Advisor API with your ticketing application to share Advisor recommendations with your teams. Some setup is required, but once this scenario is complete, you can start remediating your recommendations more programmatically which will save you time as you optimize your resources.

This more advanced approach tends to work best for larger organizations, organizations managing a large number of Azure subscriptions and resources that are generating a large number of recommendations, and organizations that have a fairly sophisticated IT practice in place, since it scales well with the size of your deployments.