Free checklist
The Azure Cost Checklist
Twelve checks for where Azure spend leaks, in the order we work through them on a FinOps engagement. Run them against your own subscriptions before you talk to anyone.
Compute
- Rightsize before you buy anything. Find VMs and App Service plans running under 20 percent CPU for the last 30 days and drop a tier.
- Shut down dev and test out of hours. A schedule that stops non-production compute on nights and weekends removes about two thirds of its runtime.
- Catch idle resources. Orphaned public IPs, unattached managed disks, empty App Service plans, and stopped-but-not-deallocated VMs all still bill.
Commitment and licensing
- Cover steady-state compute with Reserved Instances or a Savings Plan. Anything running around the clock for a year is cheaper committed than on demand.
- Apply Azure Hybrid Benefit. If you hold Software Assurance, you may be paying for Windows and SQL licences twice.
- Check your Enterprise Agreement discount. Spend tiers and renewal timing change the number.
Storage and data
- Move cold blob data to the Cool or Archive tiers. Most data kept "just in case" is never read again.
- Delete or downgrade old snapshots and backups past their retention need.
- Watch egress. Cross-region and outbound data transfer is easy to design around once you can see it.
Governance
- Tag everything and enforce it with policy. You cannot cut a cost you cannot attribute.
- Set budgets and alerts per subscription, so the next spike reaches a person, not just a dashboard.
- Review the bill monthly against the architecture, not the other way around.
What this is worth
On recent engagements this checklist has cut three-year TCO by about a third and live spend by a fifth, with the reserved-capacity and licensing moves doing most of the work. The Azure Architecture Review puts a euro figure on each of these for your estate.
Common questions
Do I need Azure Cost Management enabled to run these checks?
Cost Management is free and on by default in every subscription; if you have never opened it, most of these checks start there. A few, like the Reserved Instance and Savings Plan comparisons, are easier with Azure Advisor's recommendations open alongside it.
We already reviewed cost once this year. Is it worth doing again?
Rightsizing and idle-resource checks drift within months, not years: a workload that was busy in Q1 is often idle by Q3, and a new team spinning up test environments quietly resets the dev/test schedule. Run the checklist on a quarterly cadence, not once.
Which check usually finds the most money?
On most engagements Reserved Instances and Savings Plans account for the largest single line, followed by idle resources still billing after a project ends. Rightsizing catches more instances but each one is smaller.
Does this replace a formal FinOps review?
It covers the same twelve checks a FinOps engagement runs through first, so working through it yourself gets you most of the way. What a formal review adds is the euro figure attached to each gap in your specific estate, and the governance changes that stop the same waste coming back.
Free checklist
The Azure Cost Checklist
The places Azure spend leaks, and the checks that claw it back, in the order we work through them on a FinOps engagement. Twelve checks you can run this week.
- Rightsizing and idle resources: what to shut down and downsize first.
- Reserved Instances and Savings Plans: where commitment beats pay-as-you-go.
- Azure Hybrid Benefit and the licensing you may already own.
- Storage tiers, orphaned disks, and egress you are paying for twice.