Azure cost problems usually come from four things: no visibility (no tagging, no budgets), idle resources, overprovisioned compute, and storage/network waste.
Here are 12 quick wins that typically pay off fast:
- Implement a tagging standard (Owner, App, Environment, CostCenter)
- Set budgets and alerts per subscription and key resource groups
- Find idle VMs and power them down or schedule them
- Right-size oversized VMs (CPU/RAM underutilized)
- Clean unused disks and snapshots
- Apply storage lifecycle policies (hot → cool → archive where applicable)
- Review egress/network charges (NAT/Firewall/Gateway usage)
- Consolidate duplicate tooling (multiple monitoring agents, overlapping logs)
- Turn on reservations/savings plans (when workloads are stable)
- Reduce log ingestion noise (collect what you need, not everything)
- Use scale rules for platforms (AKS/node pools, AVD host pools, etc.)
- Create a monthly "FinOps review" rhythm (simple report + actions)