Even with a dedicated administration team, manually tracking down every unused instance and misconfigured security policy in a cloud deployment can be incredibly time-consuming for organizations.

Microsoft Corp. claims that it has come up with a better approach. The company on Thursday unveiled Azure Advisor, a diagnostics tool for its infrastructure-as-a-service platform that can automatically identify operational issues in a customer deployments. It’s essentially an expanded version of the troubleshooting engine that the firm rolled out for Azure SQL Database last year. Rather than focusing exclusively on database clusters, the new service can provide insight into an organization’s entire cloud environment.

Azure Advisor is accessible through a console that lets administrators quickly specify which parts of their infrastructure they wish to analyze and select what information they want. Recommendations produced by the service focus on one of three areas: improving the performance of cloud applications, increasing their availability or reducing operating expenses. And the tool also provides the option of displaying configuration tips from the Azure Security Console to save users the trouble of opening two separate windows.

In the same spirit, Microsoft has equipped Azure Advisor with an inline troubleshooting feature that lets administrators act upon recommendations without having to switch back and forth from other tabs. The company thus hopes to up the ante against Amazon.com Inc.’s Trusted Advisor, which similarly generates operational guidance for users of its rival public cloud.

Azure Advisor could be an alternative to third-party optimization services such as Cloudyn in certain scenarios. Microsoft’s tool could appeal especially to smaller organizations that rely exclusively on its platform to power their cloud workloads and don’t require too many advanced features as a result, notably support for other providers.

Image courtesy of Microsoft