Microsoft Azure Storage Discovery


Microsoft have a new (currently in preview) service to give more visibility into your Azure Blob storage.

Azure Storage Discovery will:

  • Measure how much data is stored across all storage accounts
  • Identify regions experiencing the highest growth
  • Find opportunities to reduce costs by locating infrequently used data
  • Assess whether storage configurations align with security and compliance best practices
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage-discovery/overview

Storage is often a source of hidden spend (and waste) in the cloud, so this may well be a useful weapon in your arsenal.

How is it priced?

There is a Free tier and also a paid-for Standard tier.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage-discovery/pricing

1 The backfill feature automatically adds historic data into a Storage Discovery workspace from before the workspace is created.
2 Every workspace retains insights for some time to allow for historical analysis.

The total cost will be comprised of:

  • Pricing plan
  • Workspace configuration
  • Number of storage resources & data objects analysed

Note that a storage resource can be included in multiple workspaces and will be charged in each one.

How much will all this cost? As the service is in Preview, and you’re able to use it for free, Microsoft haven’t released pricing details. These will become available on Azure.com before October 1, 2025, when billing kicks in.

To find out more about what it does and how it works, head here.

ITAM & FinOps Tools: A crowdsourced list


I get a lot of questions about ITAM, SaaS, & FinOps tools – what is available, what do they do, which are the best etc.

The ITAM market has quite a few tools, there are several SaaS tools, and the FinOps tool market is huge…unnecessarily so some may say. This presents (at least) 2 problems:

  • Potential customers are overwhelmed and don’t know where to start
  • Genuinely innovative tools can be lost in a sea of marketing and promotion

In an attempt to help bring some clarity, I’ve started a crowd-sourced tool list here:

https://airtable.com/appEKdAtvVzFxTc0w/shrkDzHsUBHoEVK21

that currently contains 147 records…this has increase by 14% in the last 2 weeks!

The initial aim is to have a centrally available list of all the tools with some high level categorisation i.e. “SAM”, “FinOps”, “AWS only” etc. From there, I hope to add more info to help people dig deeper. Let me know what would be helpful for you!

If you think I’ve missed any – please add them here:

https://airtable.com/appEKdAtvVzFxTc0w/pagE5AfnBAh50K6ZC/form