Mine your Azure backup data, it could save you 💰💡
Your data has a story to tell. Mine it, decipher it, and turn it into actionable outcomes. 📊🔍 Azure backups can become orphaned in several ways (I'll dive into that in a future post). But here’s a key point: orphaned doesn’t always mean useless, hence the word “Potential” in the title of my Power BI report. Each workload needs to be assessed individually. If a backup is no longer needed, you might be paying for it - unnecessarily and unknowingly. 🕵️♂️💸 To uncover these hidden costs, I combined data from the Azure Business Continuity Center with a PowerShell script I wrote to extract LastBackupTime and other metadata. This forms the foundation of my report, helping visualize and track backup usage over time. This approach helped me identify forgotten one-time backups, VMs deleted without stopping the backup, workloads excluded due to policy changes, and backups left behind after resource migrations. If you delete unneeded backups and have soft-delete enabled, the backup size drops to zero and Azure stops charging for it. ✅🧹 💡 Do your Azure backups have their own untold story to tell? 📸 Here's a snapshot of my report that helped me uncover these insights 👇
Office hours: FinOps and the Microsoft marketplace
Want to unlock a faster time-to-value for your cloud and AI projects? Join us live, July 30, with your questions! Learn how the Microsoft marketplace can support your FinOps practitioners by sourcing thousands of pre-vetted solutions that accelerate AI transformation while better managing technology spend. This event features AI-generated captions during the live broadcast. Human-generated captions will be available by the end of the week.Anyone managing Azure budgets? Would love to hear how you're doing it
Hi everyone - I’m a founder working on a tool to help engineering and infra teams plan and monitor Azure cloud costs more effectively (especially when it comes to budgeting and forecasting). I’m not selling anything - just trying to understand how teams currently handle: Planning Azure spend across teams or projects Staying within budget or tracking drift over time Forecasting costs based on changing usage If you're involved in this (or have strong opinions about what Azure does well/poorly here), I’d love to hear your thoughts. Even a few sentences would be super helpful. You can DM me here or just drop a quick comment. Happy to share what I’ve learned from others too. Thanks!PowerShell script to delete all Containers from a Storage Account
After move the BootDiag settings out of the Custom Storage Account, the original Storage Account used for are still consuming space for nothing. This is part of the standard Clean Up stream need to be consider into the FinOps Plan. This script will help you to clean these Storage Accounts quickly and avoid cost paid for nothing. Connect-AzAccount #Your Subscription $MySubscriptionToClean = "MyGuid-MyGuid-MyGuid-MyGuid-MyGuid" $MyStorageAccountName = "MyStorageAccountForbootdiags" $MyStorageAccountKey = "MySAKeyWithAllCodeProvidedByYourStorageAccountSetting+MZ3cUvdQ==" $ContainerStartName = "bootdiag*" #Set subscription ID Set-AzContext -Subscription $MySubscriptionToClean Get-AzContext $ctx = New-AzStorageContext -StorageAccountName $MyStorageAccountName -StorageAccountKey $MyStorageAccountKey $myContainers = Get-AzStorageContainer -Name $ContainerStartName -Context $ctx -MaxCount 1000 foreach($mycontainer in $myContainers) { Remove-AzStorageContainer -Name $mycontainer.Name -Force -Context $ctx } I used this script to remove millions of BootDiag Containers from several Storage Accounts. You can also use it for any other cleanup use case if you need it. Fab
