Since I have been on my journey with Azure, I have long advised to start (and end) your day in the Azure portal by stopping by Azure Advisor. This is a good thing as if something has changed not just in your configuration, but also within individual services. Sometimes the services change, best practices change, and new capabilities will be added to existing services as well. But also, maybe the last or most recent change you made in the portal will be reflected in Advisor.

Today when I logged into the Azure portal, guess what, I went to Azure Advisor! A new option was presented to me to create an Advisor alert.

Lookie here, a new toy!

With this purple box, which is new for my logins, I was easily able to implement alerts to if any service has a recommendation arise (I selected to add alerts for medium or higher recommendations). If the “Recommendation Type” is selected, you can add the alerts for the services you want in particular. Pssst.. This is a nice way to see what ALL of the Azure Advisor recommendations are for the services you care about:

I CAN HAZ RECOMMENDATIONS!

I recognize many of them from what I have configured previously in my storage accounts, but it is nice to see what all of the Azure Advisor recommendations could be in the Advisor Alerts.

The one I configured is rather straightforward, and aligned to the resource group I care most about. The action of the alarm can leverage Azure Application Insights for the “Action” of what to do with the alert; and I’ve configured an email to be sent to multiple accounts; including those that are not associated with my Azure portal access. This alert configuration is shown below:

You can make very specific Azure Advisor Alerts.

Now is the fun part! I get to sit and wait for the alert to catch something organically, if it does not, I’ll seek to implement intentional changes to trigger alerts. Such as making a new storage account without secure transfer being required.

I still recommend starting and ending your login to the Azure portal to include visits to Azure Advisor; and these alerts can help catch anything that may have slipped through the cracks! Do you use Azure Advisor alerts? Share your comments below.