The Silent Budget Drain
Cloud waste isn't dramatic. Nobody gets paged at 2am because a forgotten VM is burning $340/month. It just quietly accumulates — across subscriptions, resource groups, and teams who assumed someone else was watching.
The average Azure environment carries 20-30% waste. For a $50,000/month cloud bill, that's $10,000-$15,000 going nowhere every month.
Seven Types of Azure Waste
Unsave's cost engine detects seven categories of waste:
- Orphaned Disks — Managed disks left behind after VM deletion. These keep billing at their provisioned tier rate even with zero I/O.
- Idle VMs — Virtual machines averaging under 5% CPU utilization over 14 days. Often dev/test boxes that were never shut down.
- Unused Public IPs — Allocated but not associated with any resource. Each costs ~$3.65/month — trivial alone, significant at scale.
- Idle Load Balancers — No backend pool members or zero traffic. Standard LBs cost ~$18/month whether they're serving traffic or not.
- Idle App Service Plans — Plans running with no apps deployed. A forgotten S1 plan costs $73/month.
- Unattached Network Interfaces — NICs not connected to any VM. Usually left behind after VM scale-in operations.
- Over-provisioned Resources — VMs and databases running well below their tier's capacity. A D4s_v3 running at 12% CPU should be a D2s_v3.
Right-Sizing: Beyond Simple Waste
Waste detection finds resources doing nothing. Right-sizing finds resources doing less than they're provisioned for.
Unsave's right-sizing engine analyzes 14 days of Azure Monitor metrics:
- CPU utilization — average, peak, and P95
- Memory usage — available bytes vs. total
- Network throughput — ingress and egress patterns
- Disk I/O — read/write operations and throughput
Based on these metrics, each VM is classified:
| Classification | Criteria | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| Idle | <5% CPU, minimal I/O | Shutdown or delete |
| Underutilized | 5-35% CPU | Downsize SKU |
| Right-sized | 35-80% CPU | No action |
| Overutilized | >80% CPU | Upgrade SKU |
Each recommendation includes the current monthly cost, recommended SKU cost, and projected savings.
FinOps Scoring
Beyond individual findings, Unsave calculates a FinOps Score (0-100) across four dimensions:
- Reservation Coverage (30%) — are you using reserved instances where it makes sense?
- Right-Sizing (25%) — are resources matched to actual usage?
- Waste Elimination (25%) — how much detectable waste remains?
- Budget Adherence (20%) — are you staying within defined thresholds?
The score gives you a single metric to track cost optimization maturity over time, with letter grades from A+ to F.
Find your Azure waste in 60 seconds. Try Unsave free at unsave.io.