Find the Azure waste hiding in your cloud bill.
From idle compute and orphaned storage to cost anomalies and governance gaps, WasteRadar turns Azure telemetry into clear, actionable cost opportunities.
Turn Azure cost telemetry into an actionable waste and governance workflow.
Azure invoices tell you how much you spent. WasteRadar identifies which unattached, idle, and non-compliant assets generated those charges and tracks verified reduction.
DISCOVER
Continuous TelemetrySafely query Azure Resource Graph and Cost Management APIs to discover all provisioned assets and hourly billing meters across subscriptions.
UNDERSTAND
Evidence & ContextConnect technical telemetry (power state, attachment pointers, metrics) to plain-English business impact and exact monthly run-rate waste.
GOVERN
Rules & OwnershipEnforce tagging standards, alert engineering teams on spend anomalies, and maintain subscription hygiene with zero write permissions.
VERIFY
Proven RealizationTrack remediation through a 4-stage pipeline until subsequent Azure invoice cycles mathematically confirm that recurring meter charges have ceased.
Detection Catalog & FinOps Blueprints
Filter by resource domain, search specific resource types, inspect detection heuristics, and understand remediation impact.
Idle Virtual Machines
Identify VMs consuming Azure capacity without meaningful utilization over historical observation windows.
Uses resource configuration, power state metrics, and available utilization telemetry (e.g. CPU < 2% average over 30 days).
Review workload ownership, apply automated shutdown policies for non-production hours, or deallocate the instance.
Stopped but Still Allocated
Detect virtual machines that appear stopped but may continue generating infrastructure costs because they remain allocated.
Power state is 'PowerState/stopped' with active core allocation meters and attached premium OS disks actively metering.
Deallocate the compute instance directly in the Azure Portal or via Azure CLI so hardware reservations cease.
Underutilized Compute
Identify resources where provisioned capacity appears higher than observed workload demand across CPU and memory baselines.
P95 CPU headroom < 15% and peak memory usage below 30% over a 30-day rolling window.
Right-size the virtual machine SKU to the next smaller size or transition to burstable B-series for variable workloads.
Unattached Managed Disks
Find managed disks that remain provisioned after they are no longer attached to an active workload.
ManagedBy is null, disk state is Unattached, and the resource has remained unattached for longer than 7 consecutive days.
Review data retention requirements. Create a backup snapshot if required, then delete the unattached managed disk in the Azure Portal.
Orphaned Snapshots
Surface aging snapshots associated with retired or decommissioned workloads, prompting review before unnecessary accumulation.
Snapshot timestamp > 90 days old with obsolete or deleted source resource references.
Review organizational compliance and retention requirements before removal. Delete obsolete temporary snapshots or export critical backups to Azure Blob Archive storage.
Unused Public IPs
Identify public IP resources that remain provisioned without an active association to a VM, Load Balancer, or Gateway.
Public IP object with null IP configuration binding for longer than 72 consecutive hours.
Release the unassociated public IP address reservation back to the regional Azure pool if not explicitly reserved for upcoming firewall whitelisting.
Non-Production Waste
Find development and test resources that remain active beyond their useful operating periods across dev, test, and staging tiers.
Resources tagged Environment in ['dev', 'test', 'sandbox'] operating 24/7 with zero off-hours shutdown policies configured.
Configure Azure native Auto-Shutdown policies (e.g. 7 PM daily), transition dev databases to Serverless auto-pause, or implement start/stop automation runbooks.
Cost Anomalies
Detect unexpected changes in Azure spending and connect the change to specific services, resource groups, and affected resources.
Daily spend increase exceeds standard deviation threshold (> 25% delta) with service-level attribution (e.g. Bandwidth egress surge in East US).
Inspect the identified affected resource group in the Anomaly Inspector, review recent deployment audit logs, and scale in runaway services.
Budget & Run-Rate Risk
Understand current spend, daily run rate, projected month-end cost, and budget utilization before the final bill surprises you.
Projected month-end spend exceeds configured budget limit threshold (e.g. 80% actual / 100% forecasted trigger).
Review top spend drivers in the Costs & Budgets explorer, deallocate idle non-prod workloads, and adjust allocation limits.
Tag & Cost Allocation Gaps
Identify resources missing required ownership, environment, or cost allocation tags (e.g. Environment, Owner, CostCenter, Application).
Resource object lacks one or more required tagging keys in its ARM metadata dictionary.
Apply missing tags directly in the Azure Portal or enforce automated tag inheritance via Azure Policy definitions.
Empty Resource Groups
Find empty resource groups left behind after teardowns or migrations to reduce administrative noise and improve inventory clarity.
Resource group with child resource count equal to 0.
Delete empty resource groups in the Azure Portal or clean up via infrastructure-as-code state synchronization.
How WasteRadar complements Azure Cost Management & Advisor
WasteRadar does not replace your native billing portal — it connects directly to Azure APIs to turn raw telemetry into actionable waste findings and proven savings.
| FinOps Capability | Azure Cost Management | Azure Advisor | WasteRadar Platform |
|---|---|---|---|
| Billing Visibility & Cost Analysis | Full native charts & dimensional filtering | High-level service summaries | Multi-tenant spend attribution & run rates |
| Actionable Waste Findings | Raw resource tables (manual audit) | Periodic generalized recommendations | Deterministic, evidence-backed finding catalog |
| Custom Governance Rules | Budget limit alerts only | Pre-set Microsoft recommendations | Customizable KQL thresholds & tag policies |
| Finding Lifecycle & Assignment | Not supported | Postpone or dismiss only | Active, Ignored, Remediated status tracking |
| Verified Savings Workflow | Manual retrospective invoice comparison | Projected estimate only | 4-stage mathematical proof of invoice savings |
| Security & Permissions Boundary | Azure Portal native | Azure Portal native | 100% Read-Only IAM with Tenant RLS isolation |
Questions about Azure waste detection
Q.How does WasteRadar work alongside Azure Cost Management and Azure Advisor?
Azure provides powerful native cost analysis, budgets, and advisor recommendations. WasteRadar complements these tools by turning raw telemetry into an actionable FinOps lifecycle: discovering unattached and idle infrastructure, providing deep technical evidence, tracking findings, and mathematically verifying realized savings over subsequent billing cycles.
Q.What Azure waste can WasteRadar detect?
WasteRadar detects unattached managed disks, stopped (not deallocated) virtual machines, underutilized compute instances, idle non-production jumpboxes, orphaned disk snapshots, unused static public IPs, unattached temporary scratch volumes, cost anomalies, budget run-rate risks, and missing cost allocation tags.
Q.Does WasteRadar automatically delete or shut down resources?
No. WasteRadar is an entirely read-only platform. We never delete, stop, restart, or mutate your cloud infrastructure. All remediation actions are performed safely by your own engineering team using your established change management workflows.
Q.Are savings guaranteed?
WasteRadar calculates potential cost opportunities based on active Azure Resource Graph configurations and official Microsoft retail meters. Actual realized savings depend on which recommendations your team chooses to execute and your specific Azure agreement discounts.
Q.How does WasteRadar calculate potential waste?
Potential waste is calculated deterministically using Azure retail pricing APIs for the specific resource SKU, region, and storage tier (e.g. standard monthly GB charge for an unattached 128 GB P10 disk or continuous core reservation for a stopped D4s_v5 VM).
Q.How are savings verified?
WasteRadar tracks every finding through a 4-stage realization pipeline (Potential → Expected → Pending Verification → Verified). Once remediated in Azure, subsequent Cost Management billing cycles mathematically confirm that recurring meter charges have ceased.
Q.What Azure permissions are required?
Only standard read-only IAM roles: 'Reader' (for Resource Graph inspection) and 'Cost Management Reader' (for billing meter queries). We never request or accept write, owner, or contributor permissions.
Start discovering cloud waste in your subscriptions today.
Connect in 5 minutes with read-only permissions. Zero agent installations, zero background processes, zero production mutation risk.