Azure Fundamentals · Lesson

Identifying and Eliminating Waste

Use Azure Cost Management + Advisor recommendations to find idle VMs, unattached disks, over-provisioned services, and zombie resources, then decommission them.

Cloud Waste: The Hidden Cost Driver

Studies consistently show that organisations waste 25–35% of their cloud spend on resources that are idle, over-provisioned, or forgotten. In Azure, common waste sources include VMs running around the clock with near-zero CPU usage, unattached managed disks left over after VM deletion, orphaned public IP addresses, and unused App Service plans. Identifying and eliminating this waste is the first and highest-ROI step in any FinOps practice.

Azure Advisor Cost Recommendations

Azure Advisor continuously analyses your resource utilisation and generates Cost recommendations automatically. Common recommendations include: right-size or shut down under-utilised VMs (below 5% CPU or 2% memory utilisation for 7 days), purchase Reserved Instances for consistently running VMs, delete unattached public IP addresses, and remove idle Application Gateway instances. Each recommendation shows the estimated monthly savings so you can prioritise by impact.

# List Advisor cost recommendations via CLI
az advisor recommendation list \
  --category Cost \
  --query '[].{Resource:resourceName, Impact:impact, Savings:extendedProperties.annualSavingsAmount}' \
  --output table

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