We are excited to announce the general availability of Azure Storage Discovery.
We are excited to announce the general availability of Azure Storage Discovery, a fully managed service that provides enterprise-wide visibility into your data environment in Microsoft Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage. Azure Storage Discovery helps you optimize storage costs, adhere to security best practices, and increase operational efficiency. With the built-in integration of Microsoft Copilot in Azure, all decision makers and data users can access and uncover valuable data management insights using simple, everyday language – no specialized programming or querying skills required. An intuitive environment provides advanced data visualizations and actionable intelligence that matter most to you.
Businesses accelerate digital transformation by storing large amounts of data in Azure Storage for AI, analytics, cloud-native applications, HPC, backup and archiving. This data spans multiple subscriptions, regions, and accounts to meet workload needs and compliance rules. Data sprawl makes it difficult to track data growth, identify unexpected data reductions, or optimize costs without a clear view of data trends and access patterns. Organizations strive to identify which datasets and business units are most conducive to growth and utilization. Without a global view and simplified overviews across all storage accounts, it is challenging to ensure that data availability, placement, security and redundancy are consistently aligned with best practices and compliance requirements.
Azure Storage Discovery makes it easy to get and analyze insights to manage such large data areas.
Analyze your data environment with Azure Storage Discovery
Azure Storage Discovery makes it easy to set up a workspace with storage accounts from any region or subscription you have access to. The first statistics are available in less than 24 hours and you can start analyzing your data assets.
Unlock intelligent insights using natural language with Copilot in Azure
Use natural language to request the storage information you need to achieve your storage management goals. Copilot in Azure expresses them using rich data visualizations such as tables and graphs.
Interactive reports integrated into the Azure Portal
Azure Storage Discovery generates out-of-the-box dashboards that you can access from the Azure Portal with statistics to help you visualize and analyze your data environment. The reports include filters for your datastore by region, redundancy, and performance, allowing you to quickly drill down and uncover the statistics that matter to you.
Advanced storage statistics
Reports provide at-a-glance statistics across different dimensions and help you manage data efficiently:
- Capacity: Statistics on resources, object sizes and counts aggregated by subscriptions, resource groups and storage accounts with growth trends.
- Activity: Visualize transactions, inputs and outputs to gain insight into how your storage is being accessed and used.
- Security: It highlights critical security configurations of your storage resources with outliers, including public network access, shared access key, anonymous blob access, and encryption settings.
- Settings: Shows configuration patterns across your storage accounts, such as redundancy, lifecycle management, inventory, and more.
- Errors: It highlights failed operations and error codes to help identify patterns of problems that may be impacting workloads.
Start your statistics for free, including 15 days of historical data
Getting started is easy with access to 15 days of historical reports within hours of deploying your Azure Storage Discovery workspace. The standard pricing plan offers the most comprehensive set of reports, while the free pricing plan helps you with the basics.
Analyze long-term trends with 18-month statistics
Azure Storage Discovery Workspace with the standard pricing plan retains statistics for up to 18 months so you can analyze long-term trends and any business- or seasonal-specific workload patterns.
Azure Storage Discovery is available to you today! You can learn more about Azure Storage Discovery here and even get started on the Azure Portal here.
Use Copilot to solve your most important business problems
During the design of Azure Storage Discovery, we spoke with many customers in various critical roles such as IT managers, data engineers, and CIOs. We realized that AI could simplify integration by removing the need for infrastructure deployment or coding knowledge. As a result, we’ve included Copilot in Azure Storage Discovery from the start. It offers insights beyond standard reports and dashboards by using natural language queries to provide actionable information through visualizations such as trend charts and tables.
To get started, simply go to the Azure Storage Discovery workspace resource on the Azure portal and activate Copilot.
Identify opportunities to optimize costs
Understanding storage size trends is critical to cost optimization, and analyzing these trends by region and performance type can reveal important patterns about how data evolves over time. With 18 months of Azure Storage Discovery data retention, you can uncover long-term trends and unexpected changes in your data environment, while Copilot quickly visualizes storage size trends broken down by region.
“What is the storage size trend for the last month by region?”
Finding cost savings opportunities across multiple storage accounts can be difficult, but Copilot makes it easy by highlighting the accounts with the highest savings potential based on capacity and transactions, as outlined below.
“Provide a list of storage accounts with a default access level of Hot that are larger than 1TiB and have the fewest number of transactions”
Before taking any action, you can dive even deeper into statistics by evaluating distributions. For example, distributing third-party access between blobs.
“Show me a graph of the number of blobs by object access level”
Knowing that most objects are still in Hot layer provides immediate opportunities to reduce costs by enabling Azure Storage actions to reduce or even delete data that is not accessed frequently. Azure Storage Actions is a fully managed serverless platform that automates data management tasks—such as layering, retention, and metadata updates—across millions of blobs in Azure Blob Storage and Data Lake Storage.
Assess storage configurations for compliance with security best practices
For better storage security, Microsoft recommends using Microsoft Entra ID with managed identities instead of shared key authentication. Azure Storage Discovery allows you to quickly identify that there are still many storage accounts with shared access keys enabled and explore the list of storage accounts that need optimization.
“Show me a pie chart of my storage accounts with shared access key enabled by region”
Manage your data redundancy requirements
Azure provides several redundancy options to meet data availability, disaster recovery, performance, and cost requirements. These choices should be reviewed regularly in light of the risks and benefits for an effective storage strategy. Azure Storage Discovery quickly displays the redundancy configuration for all storage accounts and allows you to analyze the best-fit option for each workload and business-critical data.
“Show me a graph of my storage account counts by redundancy”
Price and availability
A single Azure Storage Discovery workspace can analyze storage subscriptions and accounts from all supported regions. Learn more about Azure Storage Discovery supported regions here. The service offers a release price plan with capacity and configuration statistics stored for up to 15 days aa standard pricing plan that also includes advanced information regarding activity, errors, and security configurations. Statistics are kept for up to 18 months, allowing you to analyze trends and business cycles.
For more information on pricing plans, see the Azure Storage Discovery documentation and access pricing for your region here.
Get started with Azure Storage Discovery
Getting started with Azure Storage Discovery is easy. Simply follow these two steps:
- Configure an Azure Storage Discovery workspace and select a set of subscriptions and resource groups containing your storage accounts.
- Define “scopes” that represent your business groups or workloads.
That’s it! Give it a moment. Once the workspace is configured, Azure Storage Discovery starts aggregating relevant insights and makes them available to you through intuitive graphs. You can find them in the Azure portal on the different report pages of your workspace. We even look back in time and provide historical data for 15 days. Your statistics are usually available within a few hours.
To get started, visit Azure Storage Discovery in the Azure Marketplace.
You can also deploy through the all-new Storage Center on the Azure Portal. Find Azure Storage Discovery under Data Management.
Want to read more before deploying? The planning guide walks you through all the important aspects of a successful Azure Storage Discovery deployment.
We’d love to hear your opinion. What knowledge is most valuable to you? What would add value to Azure Storage Discovery for your business? Let us know at: StorageDiscoveryFeedback@service.microsoft.com.