Question

Difficulty: MediumAzure Advisor

An organization runs its customer portal on several Azure Virtual Machines within a production environment, alongside a development environment. The IT team wants to optimize their cloud spend and ensure the application remains resilient. They decide to check Azure Advisor to identify potential improvements for these environments. Which of the following recommendations can Azure Advisor provide for this setup? (Select TWO)

  1. Buy Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances to optimize compute costs for virtual machines running continuouslyAnswer
  2. Enable virtual machine backups to ensure data resiliency and protection against accidental deletionAnswer
  3. C
    Define an Azure Policy that retroactively shuts down or deletes existing virtual machines that fail to meet utilization standards
  4. D
    Configure real-time notifications to alert administrators when a global Azure service outage affects the region hosting the virtual machines

Answer

Azure Advisor can recommend purchasing Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances to optimize compute costs for continuously running VMs, and enabling virtual machine backups to protect against data loss.
Azure Advisor provides optimization recommendations across specific categories. Purchasing Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances directly supports the Cost category by reducing running costs for continuous workloads. Enabling virtual machine backups supports the Reliability category by protecting data and ensuring application resiliency.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the organization's requirements for cost optimization and application resiliency within the scope of Azure Advisor.
Identify that Azure Advisor provides recommendations across five pillars: Cost, Security, Reliability, Performance, and Operational Excellence.
This establishes which categories of recommendations are relevant to the organization's goals.
2
Evaluate the options against the five pillars of Azure Advisor and identify tool boundaries.
Purchasing reserved instances falls under the Cost pillar, and enabling virtual machine backups falls under the Reliability pillar. Managing resource policy enforcement and tracking global service health belong to Azure Policy and Azure Service Health respectively.
This isolates the correct capabilities of Azure Advisor from other Azure governance and monitoring tools.

Key Concept

Azure Advisor provides personalized recommendations to optimize Azure deployments across cost, security, reliability, performance, and operational excellence.
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