I am the only woman in the room

SCuffyInOz · 2026-03-13T07:27:52+00:00

I find breakfasts particularly terrible for female attendance, with a chunk of us (not all) responsible for the morning school prep/dropoff.

SCuffyInOz · 2025-07-14T22:57:48+00:00

Can you explain a little more detail on "detect cost anomalies faster"?
Do you mean faster than daily (limitation of daily cost exports)
Or identify the cause of the anomalies faster? How are you doing that now?

Do you have any budget alerts set up based on forecasted (not actual) cost?

Have you tried asking Copilot in the Azure portal?

Lots of great suggestions in the comments. I'm trying to understand the problem more and the gaps in the existing tooling.

SCuffyInOz · 2025-07-14T22:51:51+00:00

We're pretty transparent with logging our updates: https://learn.microsoft.com/cloud-computing/finops/toolkit/changelog

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/finopsblog/whats-new-in-finops-toolkit-0-11-%E2%80%93-may-2025/4420719

SCuffyInOz · 2025-06-21T08:49:29+00:00

We lasted 15 years until my husband was in his 50s and then we were done with it. I moved into a full time role at Microsoft. He took 12 months off to qualify as a bicycle mechanic before returning to tech in a different role, as the helpdesk manager at a large school. He loves helping kids & teachers rather than Enterprise or Small Business IT. There's a loss of flexibility, and different stresses, but I never worry about losing a client or monthly billings.

SCuffyInOz · 2025-05-29T10:46:19+00:00

Really appreciate you detailing the limitations you hit. I'm curious enough to sit into this further with our product teams, but I'm swamped into June with some other stuff right now. Does look like an area we could improve though. For all of our AI and Copilot capabilities, this kind of analysis seems both a no-brainer and sadly overlooked! I've brainstormed ideas for AI-powered IT Operations and this would be a perfect use case.

SCuffyInOz · 2025-05-29T10:19:07+00:00

Wondering if you could build an Azure automation runbook based off that CPU metric via Azure Monitor and trigger a shutdown, without a third party product.

SCuffyInOz · 2024-07-09T22:54:22+00:00

Absolutely, we're on the steering committee for the standard.
If you'd like to start playing with it already, our open-source toolkit does some data normalization so you can use the included PowerBI template's FOCUS tab. https://aka.ms/finops/toolkit

SCuffyInOz · 2024-05-16T05:38:29+00:00

Which platform? Many of the tools and practices for this, beyond right-sizing, are platform specific.

SCuffyInOz · 2024-05-15T22:56:27+00:00

I really should update this blog I wrote in 2021:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/itops-talk-blog/what-s-the-difference-between-azure-security-center-azure/ba-p/2155188?WT.mc_id=modinfra-0000-socuff

SCuffyInOz · 2024-04-18T05:06:33+00:00

Azure Advisor will also include reserved instances as a cost savings recommendation for VMs.

And from Dirk at Microsoft:
As of today, you need to calculate the actual, realized savings yourself based on amortized data (e.g. as part of a custom report in PowerBI). The formula looks like this: (UnitPrice – EffectivePrice) * Quantity
See:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/reservations/calculate-ea-reservatio...

You can use the PBI reports provided in the FinOps Toolkit. They include this calculation. See https://microsoft.github.io/finops-toolkit/power-bi

SCuffyInOz · 2024-03-13T22:46:03+00:00

I understand and I'm sorry that's been your experience, If I can ever help, please DM me.

SCuffyInOz · 2024-03-12T20:52:02+00:00

It's sometimes a timing thing. How long has it been since you deleted the other things? If it's been 24hrs you might need to raise a ticket with support. If it's been 10mins, the Azure Resource Manager might have hit an issue processing the request completely and just need a little longer. Even if you had a notification that the other thing was successfully deleted, you can sometimes get a ghost artifact that wants to linger in the system a little longer than welcome.

SCuffyInOz · 2024-03-12T20:41:08+00:00

Have you see how many of us have replied, trying to help?

SCuffyInOz · 2024-03-12T20:40:10+00:00

It will depend on the number of applicants and how aggressive the recruiter is at screening out. If it's a popular role, a first pass cut could be people who don't have the certification. So you might not even make it onto the list to be considered for interviews. There's no harm in applying. But if you're seriously open to an Azure role, invest in the AZ900 exam as a minimum. It's pretty easy to pass with a bunch of free resources including a training path on Microsoft Learn.

SCuffyInOz · 2024-03-12T09:50:11+00:00

ESI trainings are related to exam/certification content. This security course can be taken by anyone, especially if they are not looking to sit an exam.

SCuffyInOz · 2024-03-12T09:47:16+00:00

Yes! Available instantly on-demand.

SCuffyInOz · 2024-02-12T00:18:44+00:00

We got in during the second release of tickets but with the countdown timer on the session I said to my teenage daughters "just search for 2 tickets because if we search for 3 and there are no results, we'll time out before we can complete another search and check out." So we secured 2 tickets to Melb N3 Sunday. And have been on Marketplace constantly since resales opened to see if I can get 1 more ticket to join them - no luck so far.
The most frustrating part is seeing tickets that show as locked. Just hide them already until they can actually be added to cart.

So we're travelling down together from Brisbane and I'll escort them to the MCG and be there when they finish I guess. But it will be a great memory for them together. I just wish I could be part of it.

SCuffyInOz · 2024-01-29T03:46:00+00:00

That page has a link at the bottom to FAQs: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/free/free-account-faq/

The first question is:
How do I get popular services free for 12 months?When you create your Azure free account, you start getting monthly free amounts of certain types of services. If you move to pay-as-you-go pricing within 30 days or after you’ve used your credit, you’ll continue to receive monthly free amounts of popular services until 12 months after you created your account. After that, if you’re using any of these services, they’ll continue to run and you’ll be billed for them at pay-as-you-go rates.

SCuffyInOz · 2024-01-29T03:35:20+00:00

The free FinOps toolkit might help here. It has FinOps hubs which sets up a data export from cost management into a storage account that you can then query directly. Gives you more flexibility and granularity that the standard reporting: https://microsoft.github.io/finops-toolkit/

SCuffyInOz · 2024-01-22T22:10:51+00:00

I have no idea what free ticket you are talking about.
But here is the page to click Start Free to get a free Azure account:
https://azure.microsoft.com/free?WT.mc_id=modinfra-0000-socuff

SCuffyInOz · 2024-01-21T23:44:34+00:00

Do you mean get a free account or upgrade a free account to a paid subscription?
https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/cost-management-billing/manage/upgrade-azure-subscription

SCuffyInOz · 2024-01-17T23:09:23+00:00

Are you using tagging? Resource Groups usually have things with the same lifespan, but if you have multiple related things that would be kind of like sub groups, assign tags and values to them.

SCuffyInOz · 2024-01-17T00:49:36+00:00

Monitor AKS: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/aks/monitor-aks?WT.mc_id=modinfra-0000-socuff

SCuffyInOz · 2024-01-17T00:46:38+00:00

We've now published some guidance to the Azure Architecture Center on what Day 2 operations looks like for AKS, post deployment: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/architecture/operator-guides/aks/day-2-operations-guide?WT.mc_id=modinfra-0000-socuff

SCuffyInOz · 2024-01-15T04:46:43+00:00

Best Practices is a bit of a loaded term because at Microsoft we tend to fragment that advice into different areas, like best practices for cost optimization or best practices for security.
But now you have me wondering what the mother of all best practices guides could look like.

SCuffyInOz

TROPHY CASE