Advisor provides recommendations across all Well-Architected Framework (WAF) pillars beyond just Reliability. It's the entry point for customers who want a holistic view of how to improve reliability, security, cost efficiency, and more.
Resiliency in Azure narrows the focus to zonal resiliency. It introduces additional functionality such as:
- Defining Service Groups
- Setting resiliency goals
- Tracking progress toward those goals
Its unique value is the goal-based view: customers can see exactly which Advisor recommendations they need to implement to achieve a resiliency target for their application.
Self-service enablement: Customers can independently define Service Groups and set resiliency goals. This reduces reliance on Microsoft account teams to scope workloads, accelerating time-to-value.
Goal-based resiliency tracking: Unlike Advisor's broad recommendation set, Resiliency in Azure provides a goal-oriented view. Customers can see exactly where they stand against zonal resiliency adoption and identify gaps.
Complementary to WARA: Resiliency in Azure doesn't replace WARA — it currently covers only zonal resiliency recommendations. Instead, it complements WARA by providing a lightweight, self-serve experience that helps customers operationalize resiliency improvements between WARA engagements.
- Zonal resiliency recommendations for supported services
- Expansion to additional services planned in upcoming phases
WARA delivers the most comprehensive, field-led review, covering all resiliency categories (not just zonal). Recommendations from WARA reflect deeper engagement and broader coverage.
Resiliency in Azure acts as the self-serve complement to WARA. It provides zonal resiliency recommendations for selected services, especially valuable for workloads that haven't yet gone through WARA. Through Resiliency experiences, customers get their first self-service experience to view goal-linked recommendations and act more easily. While today it's scoped to zonal resiliency, it will expand to additional resiliency categories in future releases.
Yes. Recommendations resolved in Resiliency experiences are also reflected in Advisor.
After onboarding a Service Group, can I still collaborate with Microsoft field teams on WARA reviews?
Yes. Field teams remain available for WARA reviews and ongoing support in parallel with Resiliency in Azure.
Eventually, you'll see the full list of recommendations in Advisor based on Service Group definitions. Until then, the Service Group construct is only supported for zonal recommendations in Resiliency experiences.
Currently, there's no way to convert Microsoft (field-defined) workloads into Service Groups.
How much time will it take to create Service Groups and set goals before I start seeing recommendations?
It can take around 2 hours for the recommendations for the assigned goal to be visible after Service Group is created.