Azure actions

Turbonomic monitors the state and performance of your workloads and then recommends actions to optimize these workloads at the lowest possible cost.

Note:

Use the Potential Savings and Necessary Investments charts to view pending actions and evaluate their impact on your cloud expenditure.

Historically-informed action generation for Azure workloads

Turbonomic can generate actions informed by 14 days of historical utilization data immediately after a new Azure service principal target is added. To take advantage of this feature, add at least one Azure service principal target.

Currently, actions are generated for virtual machines, volumes, and SQL databases (DTU and vCore) in both global Azure and Azure Government accounts.

The following components run after you add a target:

  • metrics-processor

  • metrics-adapter-azure-monitormetrics

Actions for virtual machines

Turbonomic supports the following actions:

  • Scale

    Change the VM instance to use a different instance type or tier to optimize performance and costs.

  • Discount-related actions

    If you have a high percentage of on-demand VMs, you can reduce your monthly costs by increasing Azure reservations coverage. To increase coverage, you scale VMs to instance types that have existing capacity.

  • Stop and start (also known as 'parking' actions)

    Stop a VM for a given period of time to reduce your cloud expenses, and then start it at a later time.

For details, see Actions for Azure VMs.

Actions for volumes

Turbonomic discovers and optimizes Azure managed volumes.

According to this Microsoft article, unmanaged volumes are deprecated and will be fully retired in 2025. In response, Turbonomic no longer discovers or monitors unmanaged volumes that are not attached to any VM. Unmanaged volumes that are attached to VMs will continue to be discovered and displayed in the user interface for your reference, but no action will be generated for these volumes.

Turbonomic supports the following actions:

  • Scale

    Scale attached volumes to optimize performance and costs.

  • Delete

    Delete unattached volumes as a cost-saving measure. Turbonomic generates an action immediately after discovering an unattached volume.

For details, see Cloud Volume Actions.

Actions for virtual machine specs

Turbonomic supports the following actions:

  • For Azure App Service plans:

    • Scale

      Scale Azure App Service plans to optimize app performance or reduce costs, while complying with business policies.

    • Delete

      Delete empty Azure App Service plans as a cost-saving measure. A plan is considered empty if it is not hosting any running apps.

    For details, see Virtual Machine Spec Actions.

  • For Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets:

    Stop and start (also known as 'parking' actions)

    Stop a Virtual Machine Scale Set for a given period of time to reduce your cloud expenses, and then start it at a later time.

    For details, see Parking: Stop or Start Cloud Resources.

Actions for app component specs (App service instances)

None

Turbonomic does not recommend actions for App Component Specs, but it does recommend actions for the underlying Virtual Machine Specs. For details, see Virtual Machine Spec Actions.

Actions for database servers

Turbonomic supports the following actions:

  • For SQL Managed Instances:

    Scale

    Change the Managed Instance to use a different instance type or tier to optimize performance and costs.

    For details, see Actions for SQL Managed Instances.

  • For Cosmos DB Accounts:

    None

    Turbonomic does not recommend actions for a Cosmos DB account but it does recommend actions for the databases and document collections in the account.

Actions for databases

Turbonomic supports the following actions:

  • Scale SQL database

    • DTU pricing model

      Scale DTU and storage resources to optimize performance and costs.

    • vCore pricing model

      Scale vCPU, vMem, IOPS, throughput and storage resources to optimize performance and costs.

    For details, see Scale Actions for SQL Databases.

  • Scale Cosmos DB database

    Scale request units (RUs) to optimize performance and costs.

    For details, see Scale Actions for Cosmos DB Databases.

  • Reconfigure Cosmos DB database

    Remove unused provisioned throughput to reduce costs.

    For details, see Reconfigure Actions for Cosmos DB Databases.

  • Delete Cosmos DB database

    Delete a database with provisioned throughput but without any underlying document collection (container) to reduce costs.

    For details, see Delete Actions for Cosmos DB Databases.

  • Suspend or stop dedicated SQL pool

    Suspend or stop a dedicated SQL pool (used in Azure Synapse Analytics) to reduce compute costs.

    • Turbonomic analysis generates suspend actions for idle pools.

      Note:

      Currently, Turbonomic analysis does not generate actions to start a suspended pool. You can start a suspended pool from the Parking page (see the next item) or from Azure.

      For details, see Suspend Actions for Dedicated SQL Pools.

    • You can use the Parking page to stop pools (running or idle), either on-demand or according to a schedule. Use the same page to start a stopped pool.

      For details, see Parking: Stop or Start Cloud Resources.

Actions for document collections (Cosmos DB containers)

Turbonomic supports the following actions: