Microsoft recently released an Azure Storage Discovery, a fully managed service that provides users with a complete overview of their blob storage estate in preview. The overview shows the user how the data estate evolved, cost optimization suggestions, and security advice based on security best practices.
Azure Storage Discovery integrates with the Azure Copilot, enabling users to use natural language to unlock insights and accelerate decision-making without utilizing any query language. The service helps users to answer key questions such as how much data is stored across all my storage accounts, which regions are experiencing the fastest growth, and where to reduce cost by adjusting access tiers or removing stale data.
Aung Oo, Vice President, Azure Storage, explains:
Insights aggregated across the entire Azure Blob Storage data estate can simplify the detection of outliers, enable long-term trend analysis, and support deep dives into specific resources using filters and pivots.
(Source: Microsoft Learn)
When users deploy a Storage Discovery workspace into their Azure resource group, they can start analyzing their data estate across subscriptions within hours. Moreover, the company will even provide historical data for up to 30 days before your workspace creation. Over time, Azure Storage Discovery enables users to analyze annual trends, like peaks and valleys in business workloads, with up to 18 months of data retention included.
In the documentation, Microsoft describes how to start with Azure Storage Discovery, by configuring a Discovery workspace first to define the resource, then creating Scopes that represent the users’ business groups or workloads, leading to the service aggregating insights and presenting them in detailed dashboards available on the Reports page.
In addition, users can analyze specific parts of their Azure Blob Storage by selecting relevant subscriptions and resource groups within their Microsoft Entra tenant. After setting up the workspace, they can create up to five scopes using ARM resource tags for logical grouping. And finally, once deployed, reports are readily accessible in the Azure portal without additional setup.
Benjamin Graus, a workplace and Azure expert, commented on LinkedIn:
Microsoft just released the public preview of Azure Storage Discovery. Azure Storage Discovery integrates with Azure Copilot so you can do things like “Where are my costs growing fastest?” But more importantly, you get a central overview of your situation.
Currently, the preview service is available in a few Azure regions, offering a Free pricing plan for insights on capacity and configurations for up to 15 days, and a Standard plan that provides advanced insights on activity, errors, and security configurations for up to 18 months. Pricing is based on the number of storage accounts and objects analyzed, with tiered rates suitable for all data estate sizes in Azure Blob Storage. Both plans are available at no cost until September 30th, 2025.
