I've recently stepped into the role of Azure admin for a large organization and I'm eager to get a handle on our cloud environment. I suspect that there are numerous orphaned subscriptions lurking around, likely running expensive resources. Since I don't own the subscriptions or the infrastructure, I'm uncertain about how to gain insight into what's operational in each subscription under our organization. My background is mostly in AWS, where as an org admin, I had access to all resources across accounts. It feels like I'm somewhat in the dark with Azure, which has me concerned about potential hurdles in debugging and future investigations. Any advice on how to navigate this?
5 Answers
Definitely reach out to your finance department. Someone has to be footing the bill for those subscriptions, and they might have some insights into what's running!
You might want to check out the various workbooks available in Azure. There's a governance workbook that can show you a lot of what you're looking for. Here's a link to it: [Governance Workbook](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-computing/finops/toolkit/workbooks/governance)!
Good luck with that! I recently delved into a tenant's DEV subscription myself, and found a SQL Managed Instance costing around $1600/month with no databases for the last two years.
Here's a helpful link to elevate your access as a global admin in Azure. It allows you to gain access to all subscriptions within your tenant: [Elevate Access](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/role-based-access-control/elevate-access-global-admin). This could really clear things up for you.
Consider deploying an Azure Landing Zone. Even if you just implement the management groups part and start moving subscriptions into those new groups, it helps with resource segmentation. Use cost management tools to identify what's being billed monthly, and don't forget to utilize the Azure Advisor to aid your efforts.
Exactly! I've heard that CloudAbility (from IBM) can help discover all resources in Azure too.
That’s wild! It really shows how easy it is for costs to spiral out of control if you're not keeping tabs.