Maneesh Sah introduces Azure Storage Discovery’s general availability, focusing on its advanced integration with Copilot for intuitive data estate analysis, operational insight, and storage management in the Azure platform.

Unlock Insights with Azure Storage Discovery and Copilot Integration

Author: Maneesh Sah

Overview

Azure Storage Discovery is now generally available, bringing comprehensive visibility and actionable insights to organizations managing large data estates in Microsoft Azure. The service integrates fully with Copilot in Azure, enabling users to interact with and analyze their storage data using simple, everyday language—no programming or query expertise required.

Key Capabilities of Azure Storage Discovery

  • Centralized Data Visibility: Unifies and reports on Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage across multiple subscriptions and regions.
  • Cost Optimization: Surfaces opportunities to optimize costs through trend analysis, tier utilization, and identifying underused storage.
  • Security and Compliance: Highlights storage configuration outliers, such as the presence of shared access keys and insufficient encryption; recommends best practices such as using Microsoft Entra ID and managed identities.
  • Operational Efficiency: Generates dashboards and visualizations in the Azure Portal, showing capacity, activity, redundancy, and error patterns.

Copilot in Azure Storage Discovery

Leverage Copilot’s natural language capabilities for:

  • Conversational Insights: Ask questions like, “How is the storage size trending over the past month by region?” and receive charts, tables, or visualizations directly in the Azure Portal.
  • Actionable Reports: Get quick breakdowns of storage accounts by size, access tier, transaction volume, security posture, and more.
  • Security Auditing: Easily identify accounts with shared access keys enabled or misaligned redundancy configurations.

Main Features

  • Automatic Dashboards: Out-of-the-box reports with customizable filters (region, redundancy, performance).
  • Historical Analysis: Free plan offers 15 days of historical data; standard plan extends retention to 18 months for long-term trend review.
  • Advanced Insights: Reports on capacity, transaction activity, security configurations, redundancy, errors, and misconfigurations.
  • Quick Setup: Begin analyzing your storage estate within hours, by simply configuring a workspace and scopes in the Azure Portal.
  • Storage Automation: Integrates with Azure Storage Actions for serverless automation of tiering, retention, and metadata management tasks.

Use Cases

  • Cost Monitoring: Visualize storage use by region and access tier to spot inefficiencies and optimize spend.
  • Security & Compliance: Track configurations to ensure alignment with regulatory requirements and Azure security best practices.
  • Operational Troubleshooting: Quickly discover failed operations or unusual activity using built-in error and activity analysis.
  • Strategic Planning: Analyze trends and patterns to guide data residency, redundancy, and lifecycle strategy.

Getting Started

  1. Create an Azure Storage Discovery workspace in the Azure Portal.
  2. Select scopes for your subscriptions and resource groups.
  3. Activate Copilot for intuitive analysis via natural language queries.
  4. Explore dashboards, download insights, and automate actions as needed.

Pricing and Availability

  • Free Plan: Basic insights with 15 days’ retention.
  • Standard Plan: Advanced analytics and security insights with 18 months’ retention.
  • Pricing details and regional availability are available online.

Feedback

Microsoft encourages feedback about which insights are most valuable and requests suggestions at StorageDiscoveryFeedback@service.microsoft.com.

This post appeared first on “The Azure Blog”. Read the entire article here