From queries to conversations: Unlock insights about your data using Azure Storage Discovery—now generally available
We’re thrilled to share that Azure Storage Discovery is now generally available.
We’re excited to introduce Azure Storage Discovery, a fully managed service designed to grant you a comprehensive view of your data estate within Microsoft Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage. This service helps you manage storage expenses, adhere to security standards, and boost operational efficiency. With integration of Microsoft Copilot in Azure, professionals at all levels can easily access critical data management insights using everyday language—no advanced programming skills required. The user-friendly interface provides insightful visualizations and actionable intelligence tailored to your needs.
As businesses accelerate their digital transformation, they’re storing substantial data in Azure Storage for various purposes including AI, analytics, cloud-native applications, high-performance computing, backup, and archiving. This data often sprawls across multiple subscriptions, regions, and accounts to satisfy workload requirements and compliance standards. The resulting data complexity makes tracking growth, identifying unexpected reductions, or optimising expenses without clear visibility difficult. Companies find it hard to pinpoint which datasets and business units produce the most growth and usage. Lacking a global perspective and streamlined insights across storage accounts makes it tough to ensure that data availability, residency, security, and redundancy consistently comply with best practices and regulatory standards.
Azure Storage Discovery simplifies the process of gaining insights and managing large data estates.
Analyse Your Data Estate with Azure Storage Discovery
With Azure Storage Discovery, you can quickly set up a workspace including storage accounts from any accessible region or subscription. You’ll have your first insights in under 24 hours, enabling you to begin analysing your data estate right away.
Unlock Intelligent Insights Using Natural Language with Copilot in Azure
Easily request the storage insights you require to reach your storage management goals using natural language. Copilot in Azure translates these requests into detailed visualizations like tables and charts.
Interactive Reports Integrated Within the Azure Portal
Azure Storage Discovery automatically generates dashboards accessible through the Azure portal, offering insights that help you visualise and analyse your data estate. These reports feature filters that allow you to slice your storage data by region, redundancy, and performance, making it easier to delve deeper into insights that matter to you.
Advanced Storage Insights
The reports deliver concise insights across multiple dimensions to help you manage your data effectively:
- Capacity: Provides insights on resource size, object sizes, and counts aggregated by subscriptions, resource groups, and storage accounts, including growth trends.
- Activity: Visualise transactions, data ingress, and egress to understand how your storage is accessed and utilised.
- Security: Reveals critical security configurations of your storage resources, highlighting any issues such as public network access or insufficient encryption settings.
- Configurations: Displays configuration patterns amongst your storage accounts, including redundancy and lifecycle management.
- Errors: Identifies failed operations and error codes, helping you pinpoint issues that may affect workloads.
Kickstart Your Insights for Free, Including 15 Days of Historical Data
Getting started is straightforward with access to 15 days of historical insights just hours after setting up your Azure Storage Discovery workspace. The standard pricing plan includes a comprehensive suite of insights, while the free plan offers the essentials to get you going.
Analyse Long-Term Trends with 18 Months of Insights
The Azure Storage Discovery workspace under the standard pricing plan retains insights for up to 18 months, allowing you to examine long-term trends and any specific workload patterns.
You can access Azure Storage Discovery today! To learn more about Azure Storage Discovery, or get started on the Azure Portal here.
Use Copilot to Tackle Key Business Challenges
While designing Azure Storage Discovery, we spoke with various customers in vital roles, including IT managers, data engineers, and CIOs. We discovered that AI could simplify the onboarding journey by eliminating the need for complex infrastructure or programming knowledge. That’s why Copilot is integrated into Azure Storage Discovery from the beginning. It provides insights that go beyond standard reports, using natural language queries to deliver actionable information via visualisations like trend charts and tables.
To begin, navigate to your Azure Storage Discovery workspace resource within the Azure portal, and activate Copilot.
Identify Opportunities to Optimise Costs
Understanding trends in storage size is essential for cost optimisation. By analysing these trends by region and performance type, you can uncover valuable insights into how your data changes over time. With Azure Storage Discovery retaining data for up to 18 months, you can spot long-term trends and unexpected changes in your data estate while Copilot quickly visualises storage size trends by region.
“How has the storage size been trending over the past month by region?”
Finding cost-saving opportunities across multiple storage accounts can be tricky, but Copilot makes it easier by pinpointing accounts with the greatest savings potential based on capacity and transactions, as illustrated below.
“Provide a list of storage accounts with a default access tier set to Hot, exceeding 1TiB in size, and with the least transactions.”
Before proceeding, you can dig deeper into the insights by examining distributions, for example, the distribution of access tiers across blobs.
“Show me a chart of blob count by access tier.”
If most objects remain in the Hot tier, consider cost reduction opportunities by enabling Azure Storage Actions to down-tier or delete infrequently accessed data. Azure Storage Actions is a fully managed, serverless solution that automates data management tasks such as tiering, retention, and metadata updates across millions of blobs in Azure Blob Storage and Data Lake Storage.
Assess whether Storage Configurations Meet Security Best Practices
For improved storage security, Microsoft recommends using Microsoft Entra ID with managed identities instead of Shared Key authentication. Azure Storage Discovery allows you to swiftly identify storage accounts that still use shared access keys and examine those that require optimisation.
“Show me a pie chart of my storage accounts with shared access key enabled, broken down by region.”
Manage Your Data Redundancy Needs
Azure provides various redundancy options to meet requirements for data availability, disaster recovery, performance, and cost efficiency. It’s important to regularly assess these options against associated risks and benefits for an effective storage strategy. Azure Storage Discovery enables you to view redundancy configurations across all storage accounts and determine the most suitable option for each workload and critical business data.
“Show me a chart displaying my storage accounts by redundancy type.”
Pricing and Availability
A single Azure Storage Discovery workspace can analyse subscriptions and storage accounts across all supported regions. Find out more about the regions supported by Azure Storage Discovery here. The service comes with a free pricing plan, providing insights related to capacity and configuration for up to 15 days, and a standard pricing plan that includes advanced insights into activity, errors, and security configurations, holding insights for up to 18 months to help you analyse trends and business cycles.
Discover more about the pricing plans in the Azure Storage Discovery documentation and check prices for your region.
Get Started with Azure Storage Discovery
Starting with Azure Storage Discovery is a breeze. Just follow these two simple steps:
- Set up an Azure Storage Discovery workspace and choose the subscriptions and resource groups that contain your storage accounts.
- Define “Scopes” that represent your business groups or workloads.
That’s all there is to it! Give it a moment. Once your workspace is configured, Azure Storage Discovery starts aggregating relevant insights, which will be available through intuitive charts in the Azure portal across various report pages. We also retrieve 15 days of historical data for you. Your insights typically become accessible within a few hours.
To get started, visit Azure Storage Discovery in the Azure Marketplace.
Alternatively, you can deploy through the new Storage Center in the Azure portal. Look for Azure Storage Discovery within the “Data management” section.
Want to delve deeper before launching? The planning guide provides a comprehensive overview of essential factors for a successful Azure Storage Discovery deployment.
We’d love to hear your thoughts! What insights do you find most useful? What could make Azure Storage Discovery even better for your business? Share your feedback at: [email protected].
