Evaluate Infralign
Azure Advisor, Cost Management and where Infralign fits
Advisor prices a saving at retail rates and stops there. Infralign reads the same recommendations, adds utilisation and architecture evidence, and a person sizes what is worth doing.
Azure Advisor and Azure Cost Management come with your Azure subscription. Keep them switched on. Infralign reads Advisor through the Reader role your admin grants at connection, so the recommendations you already have become evidence inside the Decision Pack rather than a second opinion beside it.
What the Azure-native tools give you
Section titled “What the Azure-native tools give you”| Tool | What it does well |
|---|---|
| Azure Cost Management | Cost analysis by subscription, resource group, tag or service. Budgets and budget alerts. Scheduled exports, including FOCUS 1.2. Anomaly alerts on a subscription. Recommendations on reservations and savings plans. |
| Azure Advisor | Per-subscription recommendations across cost, reliability, security, performance and operational excellence. Idle and underused resources, unattached disks, commitment coverage, each priced at retail rates. |
Both are first-party, and both read your own billing and resource data at no extra charge. Nothing below asks you to turn either off.
Where a list of recommendations stops
Section titled “Where a list of recommendations stops”- Advisor sizes a saving at list price. Your invoice carries reservations, savings plans, Azure Hybrid Benefit and whatever your agreement discounts, so the figure finance can bank has to be recomputed against effective cost.
- Advisor sees a metric on a resource and nothing around it: the release window, the upstream dependency, the licence that makes a resize expensive, or the monthly batch job that makes a quiet VM necessary.
- The list is ordered by size. Nothing in it says which change is safe to do first, who has to approve it, or how long it takes.
- Where no one owns the Azure bill, a team reads the list, agrees it looks right, and closes the tab. The same recommendations are there next quarter.
The gap is measurable. On NovaPulse, an illustrative demo estate, Advisor’s raw list runs to 263 pending items worth €29.8K a month at retail rates. An audit of the same estate from the cost record alone could evidence €226 a month. Validated fixes reconciles the two numbers.
What Infralign does with Advisor
Section titled “What Infralign does with Advisor”Advisor is one of five sources the nightly run reads between 02:30 and 06:15 UTC, alongside the Cost Details API, Resource Graph, Monitor metrics and the Activity Log. Recommendations arrive through Resource Graph on Microsoft.Advisor/recommendations/read, which the Reader role already covers.
From there, three things happen. Each is live today:
- Each recommendation is correlated with what the resource actually costs you, its 30-day p95 CPU, its idle-day count and its place in the inventory.
- Candidates that survive that check appear in the app’s Recommendations workflow with an estimated saving, a confidence level and a risk level.
- Your team approves or rejects each one, and the app keeps the decision trail.
Approval records a decision. It applies nothing to your estate, and the two roles cannot change resources or configuration. The safety model sets out the gates.
What the Decision Pack adds on top
Section titled “What the Decision Pack adds on top”The Decision Pack runs six detection types and treats Advisor as an input to every one of them. A senior Azure architect then sizes each candidate against your architecture and policy. After the 45-minute call with your engineer, the Pack keeps 3 to 5 ranked decisions, and names what to leave alone. Each finding carries six fields: € impact, evidence, owner, effort, risk, next action.
The method behind that review took €750k+ a year off the Azure bill of an Irish energy-tech company. Your estate is not that one, which is what the Pack is for. See the track record.
Side by side
Section titled “Side by side”| What you want | Azure-native | Infralign today | Infralign roadmap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spend broken out by team, service and month | Cost analysis, per scope you select | Four persona dashboards over every connected subscription, refreshed by the nightly run | Nothing pending |
| Candidates for saving money | Advisor recommendations at retail rates | The same recommendations, correlated with utilisation, idle days and inventory | Nothing pending |
| A sized, owned, ordered plan | Not offered | An architect sizes and prioritises each finding, and the 45-minute call names an owner. Expert-led | Nothing pending |
| Answering “why did March jump” | Cost analysis and exports, worked by hand | Chatbot over your own billing warehouse, plus month-on-month trend reports | Nothing pending |
| Being told a cost spike is happening | Anomaly alerts on a subscription | Spikes surface in the Decision Pack and in the trend reports. In the Monthly Close, an expert flags cost surprises | Automated anomaly alerting. Roadmap, not built |
| The infrastructure-as-code change itself | Not offered | Written by hand by an Infralign architect, where the written scope covers it | Automated Bicep and Terraform pull requests. Roadmap, not built |
| Policy and Well-Architected checks on a proposed change | Well-Architected Review in the portal, run by you | An architect reviews the change plan | Automated tfsec, checkov and Well-Architected validation. Roadmap, not built |
Every roadmap row is unbuilt. Available today versus roadmap carries the full manifest.
What it costs to find out
Section titled “What it costs to find out”The Decision Pack costs €2,500, one-off, credited in full against the first 3 months of a plan. See price and terms.
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