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Optimise Azure Costs with Advisor Recommendations

Microsoft Advisor can be a powerful tool for your Azure subscription because it automatically suggest you various changes in your infrastructure based on specific pillars like Cost, Security, Reliability, Performance etc. This means that you can easily eliminate costs by following some of the findings that are automatically generated.

A sample scenario is my virtual machine that I created some time ago with SKU E2as_v5. I selected the specific type because the application that I had to install inside the server was requesting such specs but this is not the case at all. As I was looking at the recommendations, I saw a note to downscale my virtual server as it seems under utilized.

Specifically it was mentioned to downscale for D2as_v5 SKU which used 8GB RAM instead of 16GB it is cheaper and it is a general purpose VM and not Memory Optimized.

In order to downscale one should go in the virtual machine and under size select the new SKU and press resize.

But how can I be sure that the performance will be adequate and the virtual machine will perform as needed? By looking at the statistics below, I noticed that the CPU was steady and the available memory was constantly at 9GB. This means that it was heavily under utilized and the application although having minimum specs of 16GB in reality that was not accurate.

By monitoring the virtual machine after the change I can conclude that it is performing well and the original SKU was not calculated correctly.

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