As any good administrator does in Azure, one should start and end their visits to the Azure Portal in the Azure Advisor tool. I have taken my Azure storage administration journey hand and hand with Azure security, and Azure Advisor is part of the process.

Just before Ignite, the Operational Excellence recommendations for Advisor came into play. The good news is that across all of the various Azure services, storage account operational excellence recommendations have been in the first set with the release. When I logged into Azure Advisor recently, I was shown the new Operational Excellence recommendations section below:

Look at the blue. I am fixing the red.

In the notes announcing the new capability, one thing I really liked addresses the pure nature of the cloud: Repair invalid log alert rules. This is huge, considering that cloud services can change just by their nature. This means that if an Azure account has rules that detect invalid conditions, an alert will be set to correct it. The specific part that addresses my point about the cloud changing is here: “Analytics queries may become invalid overtime due to changes in referenced resources, tables, or commands.”  This is a big deal!

For Azure storage accounts, the Operational Excellence recommendations will provide recommendations if an Azure subscription consumes too many storage accounts. 250 storage accounts is the limit per Azure subscription, it seems like a high number but I can see many cases where that is a limit that could be exceeded.

The alert I had below was the first one I had in Operational Excellence, to set up a service health alert. This makes sense; ideally you would want to be alerted of an issue before users or management that consume the Azure service. This is the default recommendation:

A service alert is the default recommendation for operational excellence.

Since I first went into Azure Advisor Alerts, they have changed a bit and become more granular. I like that alerts can be built by Azure services as well as different regions. A rule to set an alert is shown below:

Azure rules for alerts are very granular.

Azure Advisor brings good information once again. I’m convinced that all Azure administrators should start and end their administrative sessions in Azure Advisor to catch new recommendations, and in this case when the free Azure Advisor provides more categorical insight; it’s worth taking note!