Introducing Azure Storage Discovery: Transform data management with storage insights
We’re thrilled to share that Azure Storage Discovery is now available for public preview! This fully managed service allows you to gain comprehensive visibility over your Azure Blob Storage data across your entire enterprise.
Azure Storage Discovery offers a unified view to help you comprehend and analyse the evolution of your data estate over time. It assists in optimising costs, improving security, and enhancing operational productivity. With integration to Azure Copilot, you can use natural language to access insights and speed up decision-making without needing to write complex queries.
As your organisation grows its online presence, managing extensive data sets across various departments becomes increasingly difficult. Gathering insights from the full Azure Blob Storage data estate can simplify the detection of anomalies, facilitate long-term trend analysis, and encourage in-depth exploration of specific resources through filters and pivots. Currently, many users depend on different tools and PowerShell scripts to generate, maintain, and view these insights, necessitating ongoing development and infrastructure management. Azure Storage Discovery streamlines this process by consolidating data insights from all subscriptions in your Microsoft Entra tenant and presenting them directly in the Azure portal.
Whether you’re a cloud architect, storage administrator, or involved in data governance, Azure Storage Discovery helps you quickly answer pivotal questions about your enterprise Azure Blob Storage data:
- What volume of data do we store across our storage accounts?
- Which regions are experiencing the most growth?
- Can we cut costs by identifying underutilised data?
- Are our storage setups compliant with security and best practice guidelines?
With Azure Storage Discovery, you can explore these insights and more in just a few clicks, with the help of Copilot by your side.
Moving from Insight to Action with Azure Storage Discovery
Azure Storage Discovery makes it easier to uncover and evaluate insights from numerous storage accounts, turning complexity into clarity with just a few clicks.
Here are some of its key features:
Utilise Azure Copilot to get answers to the most crucial storage inquiries for your business without needing to grasp a complex query language or writing any code. Copilot goes beyond standard reports by integrating insights related to capacity, activity, errors, and configurations.
Obtain detailed storage insights that assist in understanding how your Azure Blob Storage data estate is expanding, identify potential cost reductions, discover underutilised data, and recognise any workloads that may be experiencing restrictions. These insights include important metrics such as storage capacity (size and number of objects), data activity (transactions, ingress, egress), and transaction errors, alongside comprehensive security and cost optimisation configurations.
Interactive reports within the Azure Portal enable easy trend analysis over time, allowing you to explore leading storage accounts and quickly access specific resources displayed in each chart. Reports can be tailored to focus on distinct areas of the data estate, applying filters based on storage account configurations such as regions, redundancy, performance type, and encryption types. Enjoy organisation-wide visibility with flexibility in scoping to gather insights across multiple business groups or workloads. You can analyse up to 1 million storage accounts across various subscriptions, resource groups, and regions within a single workspace, enabling fast access to actionable insights for optimising your data estate.
A fully managed service right in the Azure Portal means no additional infrastructure setup or impact on critical business operations.
As much as 30 days of historical data will automatically appear within hours of deploying Azure Storage Discovery, with insights retained for up to 18 months.
Customer Experiences
Several customers have already begun exploring Azure Storage Discovery during its preview phase to analyse their Azure Blob Storage data estate. Here are a few examples of organisations that found instant value from the service.
Getting a Comprehensive Overview of the Data Estate in Azure Blob Storage
Tesco, a leading global retailer, has been using Storage Discovery in preview to achieve a seamless view of its Azure Blob Storage data estate. To improve agility in development, Tesco operates its cloud deployments in a democratic manner, allowing different departments and teams the freedom to manage their subscriptions and storage accounts. However, to control costs and ensure optimal deployment configurations, each team needs detailed insights promptly. The Cloud Platform Engineering (CPE) team collaborates with various teams to provide consolidated data for cost analysis, security, and operational reporting. Previously, gathering and sharing these insights was a manual and laborious task. As pioneers in using Azure Storage Discovery, Tesco now benefits from a centralised dashboard that presents key metrics and baselines in a single view, significantly reducing the time and resources needed to address common questions such as “How much data do we have, and where is it located?” or “What are our baseline trends?”
As our Azure Storage data estate grows, collecting insights for decision-making around our operations becomes increasingly challenging—especially given the pace often demanded by stakeholders. Currently, we rely on PowerShell scripts for data gathering, which can take a considerable amount of time due to the scale involved. Anything that can expedite insight collection is incredibly valuable. Additionally, the data we obtain is crucial for discussions with application teams, enabling us to concentrate on essential issues rather than being overwhelmed by excessive data.
—Rhyan Waine, Lead Engineer, Cloud Platform Engineering, Tesco
Controlling Budget by Identifying Rapidly Growing Storage Accounts
Willis Towers Watson (WTW) leads in using generative AI to enhance its Human Resources and Insurance services while managing costs effectively. With Azure Storage Discovery, their team quickly pinpointed storage accounts where data growth was outpacing expectations, resulting in rising costs. By identifying these critical storage accounts, they could analyse usage patterns, implement optimisations, and better control expenses.
Once my team began using Storage Discovery, they were immediately impressed by its insights. Their response was enthusiastic, ‘Let’s dive in and see what we uncover.’ Almost immediately, we pinpointed several storage accounts experiencing unusual growth. With this clarity, we were able to target those accounts specifically. We also discovered data that had been neglected for a prolonged period, allowing us to implement automatic clean-ups using Blob Lifecycle Management to effectively manage and remove unused data.
—Darren Gipson, Lead DevOps Engineer, Willis Towers Watson
How Azure Storage Discovery Operates
To begin with Azure Storage Discovery, just follow these two straightforward steps: first, set up a Discovery workspace that outlines your resource definitions, and second, establish the Scopes corresponding to your business groups or workloads. Once these steps are completed, Azure Storage Discovery will start compiling relevant insights and presenting them in detailed dashboards available on the Reports page.
Creating a Discovery workspace lets you select the segments of your Azure Blob Storage data estate for analysis. You can choose all the subscriptions and resource groups relevant to you within your Microsoft Entra tenant. Once your access credentials are verified successfully, Azure Storage Discovery can move to the next phase.
After successfully configuring your workspace, you can create up to 5 scopes, each representing a business group, workload, or any logical grouping of storage accounts important to your business. This filtering can easily be done by selecting ARM resource tags that were previously assigned to your storage accounts.
Once the deployment is complete, Azure Storage Discovery provides reports directly within the Azure portal, requiring no extra setup.
Pricing and Availability
Azure Storage Discovery is available in select Azure regions during its public preview. The service offers a Free pricing plan, where insights related to capacity and configurations are kept for up to 15 days, and a Standard plan that includes advanced insights regarding activity, errors, and security configurations retained for up to 18 months. This allows for analysis of annual trends and cycles in your business workloads. Pricing is based on the number of storage accounts and objects analysed, with tiered rates to accommodate all sizes of data estates in Azure Blob Storage.
Both the Free and Standard plans will be offered at no cost until September 30th, 2025. You can find further details about pricing in the Azure Storage Discovery documentation.
Start Using Azure Storage Discovery
You can quickly harness the power of Azure Storage Discovery within just a few minutes. We invite you to explore Azure Storage Discovery for managing your object storage. For a quick start, consult the quick start guide to set up your first workspace. To delve deeper, be sure to check out the documentation.
We’re eager to hear your thoughts. What insights do you find most beneficial? What features would enhance your experience with Storage Discovery? Share your feedback with us at [email protected].
