Making Sense of Right-Sizing Recommendations from Cloud Advisors

Azure Advisor Says: “Right-size or Shutdown Underutilized Virtual Machines”

Azure Advisor recommends rightsizing or shutting down underutilized virtual machines (VMs) to optimize costs. On paper, this sounds simple:

🔹 Potential Benefit: Savings
🔹 Impact: High

The recommendation is so ambiguous that it deserves to be discarded unless we get the following answers.

👉 If you have 10,000 VMs, how do you decide which ones to resize or shut down?
👉 What if low utilization is intentional for certain workloads?
👉 How do you scale this decision-making process across a large cloud environment?

Microsoft provides a framework for these decisions, but real-world acceptance of this recommendation is highly questionable because it is complex.

🔗 Learn more about Azure Advisor’s cost recommendations

AWS Compute Optimizer Suggests: “Right-size Over-Provisioned EC2 Instances”

AWS takes a more structured approach with Compute Optimizer, providing a detailed rightsizing guide that includes cost-saving insights.

🔗 Read AWS’s blog on leveraging Compute Optimizer

AWS has invested heavily in making the recommendations meaningful, but once again acceptance at scale remains the real hurdle.

If you have 10,000 EC2 instances, how do you:
✔️ Identify the right candidates for shutdown vs. rightsizing?
✔️ Ensure business-critical workloads aren’t impacted?
✔️ Take action without excessive manual effort?

AWS and Azure provide you a starter kit—but PrimeOrbit ensures you actually get it done, at scale.

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PrimeOrbit: The Smart Engine for Rightsizing at Scale

🔹 Powerful AI Tagging Capability – Determines if a VM/EC2 instance is Production or Non-Production to avoid accidental shutdowns.
🔹 Automated Usage Analysis – Uses dynamic thresholds to auto-analyze VM/EC2 utilization patterns.
🔹 Intelligent Decision-Making – Disambiguates whether an instance should be shut down or rightsized.
🔹 If Shutdown, do we set it on a schedule to start/stop?  
🔹 If Right-size, what’s the right instance type for?
🔹 Precision Rightsizing – If rightsizing is the best option, PrimeOrbit automatically calculates the right instance type, eliminating guesswork.
🔹 Cost-Driven Optimization – When you superimpose utilization metrics with cost data, PrimeOrbit ensures that every rightsizing decision actually delivers financial impact.

An example of a Utilization Pattern that resulted in a Shut-down recommendation:

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An example of a Utilization Pattern that resulted in a Resize recommendation:

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A No-Frills Solution for Overloaded FinOps Teams

If cloud cost optimization and team fatigue are real challenges for your organization, PrimeOrbit is the solution you need to evaluate.
🚀 Ready to reduce load on your FinOps team? Let’s talk.