Eight new Azure recommendation types now scan your environment for idle, unattached, and over-provisioned resources, then tell you exactly what to cut.
Why this matters
You can’t reclaim Azure waste you can’t see. Until now, an unattached disk sitting idle for weeks, a static IP pointing at nothing, or a load balancer with no backend would quietly accrue charges with nothing in CloudZero flagging them. Finding that waste meant knowing where to look and digging through the Azure portal by hand.
Now CloudZero surfaces it for you. These eight checks pinpoint specific, addressable waste and tell you the action to take, so the work shifts from hunting to deciding. The savings are concrete: the first customer to connect their Azure environment found nearly $40,000 a year in wasted spend on the first pass. The savings on individual checks are large: Azure Hybrid Benefit can cut eligible Windows Server VM costs by more than 40% and SQL Server VM costs by up to 55%.
What we built
Eight new Azure recommendation types are now live in the Optimize catalog. They join your Azure resource metadata with billing data to detect waste that billing data alone can’t reveal:
- Downgrade Azure Firewall from Premium to Standard – Premium firewalls not using IDPS or TLS inspection
- Delete unattached managed disks – disks left in an unattached state for 7 or more days
- Release unattached public IP addresses – static IPs not associated with any resource
- Enable Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server VMs – Windows VMs running without AHUB (40%+ savings)
- Enable Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server VMs – SQL Server VMs running without AHUB (up to 55% savings)
- Migrate storage accounts from GPv1 to GPv2 – legacy accounts ahead of the October 2026 retirement
- Delete application gateways with empty backend pools – gateways routing to nothing
- Delete load balancers with empty backend pools – idle Standard load balancers processing under $1 of data
How it works
These recommendations rely on Azure resource data, so the one prerequisite is connecting it: assign the CloudZero service principal the Reader role on your Azure root management group, after which all subscriptions inherit access automatically. Once resource data is flowing, the eight checks generate recommendations and appear in Optimize alongside your other findings. You can enable or disable any of them from the catalog under Optimize Settings, and changes take effect on the next daily analysis cycle.
Next steps: A list of wasteful resources is useful, but a list of wasteful resources attributed to a specific team, product, or environment is actionable. CloudZero dimensions are how you get there; they let you slice your spend by whatever categories matter to your business, so a recommendation for an idle disk or an unneeded load balancer lands in the right hands, not just a shared inbox.
If you haven’t set up Dimensions yet, Organizing Your Costs is the place to start. The combination of Optimize surfacing the waste and Dimensions telling you who owns it is where the real leverage lives.
