Name: WasteRadar
Brand: WasteRadar

Question 1

What is WasteRadar?

Accepted Answer

WasteRadar is an Azure cloud cost optimization and idle waste detection SaaS product developed by Odinext. It audits disks, VMs, public IPs, load balancers, NAT gateways, and resource groups to pinpoint unneeded cloud spend safely without mutating production resources.

Question 2

Who is WasteRadar built for?

Accepted Answer

WasteRadar is designed for engineering leaders, DevOps engineers, FinOps practitioners, and finance teams running infrastructure on Microsoft Azure who want transparent, automated waste detection without complex or dangerous automated write scripts.

Question 3

How does WasteRadar work?

Accepted Answer

WasteRadar connects to your Azure subscriptions using standard read-only IAM roles. In under 5 seconds, it queries Azure Resource Graph and Cost Management APIs to evaluate orphaned disks, stopped VMs, idle load balancers, and unassociated IPs against deterministic heuristic rules.

Question 4

How does WasteRadar detect idle compute without installing agents on our servers?

Accepted Answer

WasteRadar queries Azure Monitor platform metrics and Azure Resource Graph directly at the cloud control-plane level to evaluate rolling average CPU utilization over historical windows. No VM extensions, daemons, SSH keys, or guest OS agents are ever installed on your servers.

Question 5

What Azure permissions are required?

Accepted Answer

WasteRadar requires only standard read-only IAM roles: 'Reader' (for inventory and Resource Graph inspection) and 'Cost Management Reader' (for month-to-date actual spend queries). We never request or accept Contributor, Owner, or write permissions.

Question 6

Is WasteRadar completely read-only?

Accepted Answer

Yes, 100%. Our software contains zero write, delete, patch, or restart API operations. WasteRadar is physically and programmatically incapable of altering your cloud infrastructure.

Question 7

Does WasteRadar delete resources automatically or modify our cloud infrastructure?

Accepted Answer

No. WasteRadar never deletes, restarts, tags, or modifies any resource in your Azure tenant. It only generates findings and actionable remediation guides for your engineering team to execute safely in your Azure Portal or Terraform code.

Question 8

Does WasteRadar support multiple Azure subscriptions?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Multi-subscription support is configured per plan: Free and Starter plans support 1 connected Azure subscription, the Business plan supports up to 5 subscriptions under a unified organization, and Enterprise supports custom unlimited subscriptions.

Question 9

How does WasteRadar detect Azure waste?

Accepted Answer

WasteRadar executes deterministic heuristic checks against Azure Resource Graph and ARM APIs. It inspects whether managed disks are unattached, whether virtual machines are stopped without being deallocated, whether public IPs are unassociated, whether load balancers have empty backend pools, and whether NAT gateways lack attached subnets.

Question 10

Why am I still being billed for a stopped Azure VM?

Accepted Answer

When a VM is shut down from inside the guest OS, it enters 'PowerState/stopped'. Azure continues to reserve physical CPU cores and RAM allocation on the host hardware, billing 100% of the hourly compute rate in addition to managed disks. The VM must be stopped via the Azure Portal or Azure CLI ('az vm deallocate') to transition to 'PowerState/deallocated' where compute charges cease.

Question 11

Why are unattached Azure Managed Disks still billed every month?

Accepted Answer

Microsoft Azure charges for total provisioned storage capacity (GB-month) rather than consumed data. When a VM is deleted, its OS and data disks remain in the resource group in an unattached state and continue to accrue recurring monthly storage fees until explicitly deleted or snapshotted.

Question 12

What is Potential Savings vs. Verified Savings?

Accepted Answer

Potential Savings represents the estimated monthly run-rate reduction if all active waste findings are remediated in Azure. Verified Savings is measured by comparing subsequent scans against your initial baseline to confirm actual dollar reduction after resources are deleted or deallocated in Azure.

Question 13

Why is cost data sometimes marked as 'PARTIAL' or estimated?

Accepted Answer

Cost data is estimated or marked as 'PARTIAL' when the Service Principal has the 'Reader' role but lacks the 'Cost Management Reader' role, or when Azure billing APIs have not yet published daily billing meters for newly created subscriptions.

Question 14

Can I create custom FinOps rules for specific tags or cost thresholds?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Starter includes 5 custom rules, and Business includes up to 50 custom rules (Enterprise offers unlimited). You can define custom rules for missing owner/environment tags, dev environment cost surges, unapproved regions, or high-cost asset alerts.

Question 15

Can I export waste reports to share with finance or engineering teams?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Customers on the Business and Enterprise tiers can export complete waste findings, resource inventories, and cost telemetry as CSV or JSON files for sprint planning, Jira ticket creation, or executive FinOps reviews.

Question 16

How does WasteRadar use OpenAI?

Accepted Answer

WasteRadar uses Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to power intelligent cost insights and natural language FinOps explanations. Prompts and completions are processed in dedicated Microsoft Azure enterprise infrastructure, strictly isolated per tenant, and are never used to train foundation models.

Question 17

Is my data used to train AI models?

Accepted Answer

Microsoft states that prompts and completions for Models sold by Azure are not used by providers to improve their models or services and are not used to train generative AI foundation models without permission or instruction.

Question 18

Does WasteRadar send my Azure credentials to AI?

Accepted Answer

No. Azure client secrets, access tokens, and sensitive integration credentials are strictly segregated and never passed into AI prompt contexts.

Question 19

Can AI modify my Azure resources?

Accepted Answer

No. WasteRadar remains 100% read-only toward your Azure infrastructure. AI-generated recommendations provide actionable guidance for your team and cannot directly execute mutations in your cloud environment.

Question 20

Can I use WasteRadar for free?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Our Free Tier supports 1 Azure subscription with up to 250 resources and 10 discovery scans per month forever. No credit card is required to sign up or run scans.

Question 21

What happens if our Azure environment exceeds the resource limits of our plan?

Accepted Answer

If your resource count exceeds your plan's quota (250 for Free, 1,500 for Starter, 10,000 for Business), WasteRadar will scan up to the quota limit and notify your administrator to upgrade seamlessly without interrupting existing connections or data history.

Question 22

What payment methods are supported for Indian businesses?

Accepted Answer

We support major credit/debit cards, NetBanking, UPI (Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm, BHIM, UPI QR, RuPay in India via Razorpay), and automated invoice wire transfers for Enterprise customers.

Question 23

Can I cancel or change my plan anytime?

Accepted Answer

Yes. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel your subscription at any time from your account settings. Subscriptions remain active until the end of the current billing cycle with zero penalties.

Question 24

What is the refund policy?

Accepted Answer

We offer a 14-day full refund policy for paid self-serve plans if you are unsatisfied with the product. Contact support@odinext.com within 14 days of purchase.

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