This blog post is my entry into this years AzureBackToSchool community event organized and ran by Dwayne Natwick https://x.com/DwayneNcloud
In this blog post I wanted to cover what I consider to be some hiden gem Azure WorkBooks within Azure Advisor.
The 3 main workbooks I wanted to bring to your attention are as follows:-
- Reliability
- Service Retirement
- Cost Optimization
The 3 Workbooks I will refer to can be found within the Azure Portal, search for Advisor and then click on Workbooks on the left hand menu and you can see them as below:-
Lets take them in turn
Reliability Workbook
Service Retirement Workbook
This workbook is awesome for finding any resources with your Azure Environment that are due to retire or have alredy retired.
Now not all services are listed here but the teams at Microsoft are working on adding more all of the time.
The workbooks like the following: –
In the screenshot above we can see that the list of services and their due retirement date, luckily I have zero resources within my subscription(s) which had anyting due to retire, you can see this where it says None with a green tick, but if I did then I would be able to see how many resources are due to expire or that have already expired.
I get lots of emails at work telling me that service X is about to retire and I always wondered how do we manage this and the answer is to use this workbook to locate the resources which are due for retiring.
If the service in question doesnt exist within this workbook then you have a couple of options, you can either write a KQL query with Azure Resource Graph or figure out how to do similar using PowerShell. A simple ChatGPT prompt can help with this if required.
Summary
If you want to find resources that have or are about to expire then start with this workbook and then go from there.
Cost Optimization WorkBook
If you would like recommendations and detailed information regarding how to save money and not sure how to do this using Cost Analysis then this workbook is a gem.
The workbook itself looks like this:-
In the screenshot abve I have selected the Usage Optimization tab (highlighted in red) and here I can check lots of things including:-
Compute
- Virtual Machines in a stopped state
- Advisor Recommendations
Storage
- Am I using any v1 Storage accounts
- Are there any unattached Managed Disks
- Are there any Premium disks attached to powered off virtual machines
- Are there any Old Managed Disks snapshots
- Are there any Orphaned Managed Disks snapshots
- Are there any idle backups
- Advisor Recommendations
Networking
- Avoid multiple Firewall instances in the same region
- Recommendations for Application Gateways
- Recommendations for Load Balancers
- Unattached Public IPs
- Recommendations for Virtual Network Gateways
- Recommendations for NAT Gateways
- Recommendations for Express Route
- Recommendations for Private DNS
- Advisor Recommendations
Databases
- Recommendations for CosmosDB, SQL DB and SQL Elastic Pool
Sustainability
- Carbon Optimization recommendations
Summary
I think you might find the Cost Optimization WorkBook awesome and it more than likely will save you money in some way(s).