How to Use OCI Cloud Advisor for Cost Recommendations

Last updated: June 2026

Written by Fredrik Filipsson and reviewed by Morten Andersen. Method: See, Cut, Lock, Run. We have optimized $420M+ in cloud spend across 500+ environments.

OCI Cloud Advisor is a free, built-in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure service that analyzes your tenancy and produces recommendations across cost, performance, availability, and security. Its cost recommendations surface idle and underused resources, rightsizing opportunities, and storage savings, each with an estimated dollar impact, which makes it the fastest first pass at finding waste in an OCI environment. This article is part of our Oracle Cloud cluster; the pillar it links up to is the complete guide to Oracle Cloud cost optimization. Reading Cloud Advisor sits in the See step of our See, Cut, Lock, Run method, where the job is to make every dollar of waste visible before cutting it.

What is OCI Cloud Advisor?

OCI Cloud Advisor is Oracle's recommendation engine inside the OCI console that looks across your tenancy and tells you what to change to improve cost, performance, availability, and security. On the cost side it flags resources that are idle or underused, compute instances that could be rightsized, and storage that could move to a cheaper tier, attaching an estimated saving to each finding per the Oracle Cloud Advisor documentation. Because the recommendations are concrete and quantified, Cloud Advisor turns a vague "the OCI bill is too high" into a ranked list of specific actions. The value is in working that list correctly, not in treating it as gospel.

Does OCI Cloud Advisor cost anything?

No. Cloud Advisor is included with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure at no additional charge, so there is no cost reason to leave it unused. You pay only for the underlying resources it recommends changing, never for the analysis itself. That makes it the obvious starting point for any OCI cost review: it is free, it is already running against your tenancy, and it has visibility into usage patterns that a manual review would take days to reconstruct. The only investment it asks for is the discipline to validate its findings before acting on them.

How do you use Cloud Advisor for cost, step by step?

These five steps turn the recommendation list into realized savings without over-cutting.

1. Open Cloud Advisor in the OCI consoleNavigate to Cloud Advisor from the console menu, where recommendations are grouped by category. The result is a single place to see every cost finding across the tenancy.
2. Review the cost-saving recommendationsOpen the cost category to see idle, underused, and rightsizing recommendations with an estimated saving on each. The result is a quantified worklist rather than a hunch.
3. Filter and rank by estimated impactSort recommendations by estimated savings so the highest-value, lowest-risk actions come first. The result is effort spent where the money is.
4. Validate each recommendation against rightsizingConfirm a flagged resource really can be downsized or terminated before acting, since Cloud Advisor estimates from recent usage. The result is that you cut waste, not capacity you still need.
5. Act, then track and re-runImplement the validated actions, record the realized saving, and re-run Cloud Advisor after changes. The result is a repeating cycle that keeps surfacing the next wave of savings.

Should you act on every Cloud Advisor cost recommendation?

No. Treat Cloud Advisor as a prioritized starting point, not an instruction, for the same reason every cloud's recommendation engine deserves caution: it estimates from recent usage and cannot know your roadmap. A resource that looks idle this month may be a quarterly batch job; an instance flagged for rightsizing may need its headroom for a planned launch. The right pattern is to rank by impact, validate the top findings against what you know about each workload, act on the clear wins, and revisit the ambiguous ones with the owning team. This is the same input-not-instruction discipline we apply to storage tiering in reducing OCI Object Storage and Archive costs, where the cheap tier is only correct if the data is genuinely cold.

How is Cloud Advisor different from OCI Cost Analysis?

Cloud Advisor tells you what to change; Cost Analysis tells you where the money is going. Cost Analysis breaks spend down by service, compartment, and tag so you can see which parts of the estate cost the most, which is essential for understanding the bill and for allocation. Cloud Advisor takes the next step and proposes specific actions with estimated savings. You use them together: Cost Analysis to find the expensive corners and confirm an action moved the number, Cloud Advisor to generate the actions themselves. Neither replaces rightsizing judgment, but together they make the See step fast, which is why both feature in our broader Oracle Cloud cost optimization approach.

Cloud Advisor categories, recommendation types, and console navigation reflect Oracle Cloud as of June 2026. Verify current behavior in the linked Oracle documentation, because console tooling changes.

Frequently asked questions

The short version

Cloud Advisor is a free, built-in first pass at an OCI bill: rank its cost recommendations by impact, validate each against real usage, act on the clear wins, and re-run after changes. It is an input, not an instruction. When you want the list worked end to end and the savings realized, that is exactly what our OCI cost optimization service delivers.