Unlocking Azure Savings: Introducing the FinOps Best Practices Library

introduction

Have you ever wondered how recommendations in an Azure Cost Optimization workbook are generated? Or have you been thinking about customizing recommendations to fit your organization’s unique needs but don’t know where to start?

That’s the new place FinOps Best Practices Library come in

What is the FinOps Best Practices Library?

To address these challenges, we have created a library of FinOps best practices within the FinOps Toolkit. This resource is designed to be a comprehensive hub for Azure best practices. Azure Resource Graph (ARG) queries This reinforces the recommendations in the Cost Optimization workbook. Now you can see how these recommendations were built, as well as customize ARG queries to fit your specific use cases.

Key benefits of customizing ARG queries:

• Transparency about Azure recommendations: Get full visibility into ARG queries that generate cost optimization recommendations.
• Customization for specific scenarios: You can easily tailor ARG queries to better fit your organization’s infrastructure and financial goals.

Whether you aim to improve your cloud financial operations or are looking for new ways to manage your costs, this library will be a valuable resource.

Understanding ARG Code Sections

Let’s break down an example to explain how these Azure Resource Graph (ARG) queries work. The code is divided into three sections:

1. Identify unmanaged disks

In the first section, the query filters through Azure compute resources to identify all unmanaged disks and those that are not attached to a VM.

resources
| where type =~ 'microsoft.compute/disks' and managedBy == ""

2. Filter by disk status and tags

Next, filter out disks that are inactive or have specific tags that indicate their use in replication scenarios such as Azure Site Recovery (ASR).

| extend diskState = tostring(properties.diskState)
| where diskState != 'ActiveSAS'
and tags !contains 'ASR-ReplicaDisk'
and tags !contains 'asrseeddisk'

3. Project related information

Finally, it displays the most relevant information about each disk, including name, size, SKU, and creation time.

| extend DiskId=id, DiskName=name, DiskSizeGB=tostring(properties.diskSizeGB), SKUName=sku.name, Location=location, TimeCreated=tostring(properties.timeCreated)
| order by DiskId asc
| project DiskId, DiskName, DiskSizeGB, SKUName, Location, TimeCreated

The full code snippet is below:

resources
| where type =~ 'microsoft.compute/disks' and managedBy == ""
| extend diskState = tostring(properties.diskState)
| where managedBy == ""
    and diskState != 'ActiveSAS'
    and tags !contains 'ASR-ReplicaDisk'
    and tags !contains 'asrseeddisk'
| extend DiskId=id, DiskIDfull=id, DiskName=name, SKUName=sku.name, SKUTier=sku.tier, DiskSizeGB=tostring(properties.diskSizeGB), Location=location, TimeCreated=tostring(properties.timeCreated), SubId=subscriptionId
| order by DiskId asc 
| project DiskId, DiskIDfull, DiskName, DiskSizeGB, SKUName, SKUTier, resourceGroup, Location, TimeCreated, subscriptionId

Cost Optimization Workbook

If you’ve never heard of it Cost Optimization WorkbookThis is an essential Azure Advisor tool that helps organizations analyze their cloud spending and identify cost-saving opportunities by providing actionable insights. Learn more here.

New to FinOps Toolkit?

The FinOps Toolkit is a collection of open source resources to help you implement and optimize cloud financial operations on the Microsoft Cloud. We provide the following tools, automation, and guidance: Implementing FinOps The perfect guide to start your FinOps journey. You can learn more about the toolkit and how to contribute. FinOps Toolkit Site.