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Vocabulary

Sometimes commonly used terms are understood differently. Let's make a baseline on a few frequently used terms.

Container Resources - There are few resources that are seen as container resources from Azure point of view. Container resources are like a folder on file system, they can contain other resources, sometimes even other container resources, creating tree structure where leaves are actual resources and branches are other container resources.

Container resources are:

  • Management Groups
  • Subscriptions
  • Resource Groups

Workload Resources - Any non-container resource. Resource that does not have any child resources.

Examples of workload resources:

  • Virtual Machines
  • Public IP
  • Logic App
  • Network Security Group

Resources - All resources within the tenant consist of both Container and Workload resources.

Optimization - Our core business purpose is to optimize your usage of Azure. By optimization we often mean ways of saving money, but it is not always just about saving costs, since we process resources that don't cost anything, such as network security groups, managed identities, ...

Different types of optimizations:

  • Saving costs by deleting unused resources
  • Saving costs by re-sizing / altering resources
  • Housekeeping by removing unused resources
  • Recommendations how to better utilize your workload

Use Case - Main features of our system are called Use Cases. In typical software such as Microsoft Outlook, it would be something such as sending emails, receiving emails, text formatting... In our scenario, these are ways we identify, process and handle resources inside your tenant with a goal to optimize.

Examples of what are use cases for:

  • We communicate towards you, which resources are unused
  • We communicate towards you, which resources should be resized
  • You can tell us which resources we should monitor for price changes

Insights - next to the use cases, this is one of outputs from our system. Usually, insights will represent aggregated data from the whole population of resources or cherry-picked resources that might be of interest.

Examples of insights:

  • Monthly costs of all resources
  • Saved amount by taking actions against identified resources
  • Price anomalies
  • Number in % of potential savings we identified

Identified Resource - Resource that has met criteria by at least one use case and is now identified. It will be identified until either action is taken, or criteria cease to be met.

Action Taken - Action was taken against identified resource, could be deletion, resize, update setting.

Resource type - Named group of specific resources such as public ips, disks, vms.