Cost Optimization

Cost Anomaly Detection

Catch cost spikes within days, not at your next monthly bill review. StratoLens detects unusual cost changes and correlates them with the infrastructure modifications that caused them, so you know what happened and who did it.

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StratoLens is a self-hosted Azure visibility platform. It runs in your own tenant; your infrastructure data never leaves it.

The Problem

Most teams don't find out about cost spikes until the bill arrives, weeks after the cause:

Late Discovery: By the time you see the monthly bill, you've already been overspending for weeks
No Context: Billing data shows costs went up, but not which change caused it
Tedious Investigation: Connecting a cost spike to a specific infrastructure change means cross-referencing billing data with Activity Logs manually
Missed Savings: Cost drops from deprovisioned resources go unnoticed, hiding optimization wins

The Solution

Know about cost anomalies early and understand exactly what caused them:

Early Detection: Spot cost spikes within days using pattern-based anomaly detection on 60+ days of billing data
Automatic Root Cause: See which infrastructure changes correlate with the cost impact
Increases and Decreases: Distinguish cost spikes (potential problems) from cost drops (potential savings)

The $50 resource billing $1,500 a month

A customer's spend crept for months with no alert. Nothing was misconfigured, so Azure had nothing to flag. StratoLens pinned the cause in about 30 minutes: multi-revision mode left on in production, a resource that should have cost about $50 a month running at roughly $1,500. Roughly $17,400 a year, corrected the same day.

From the product

Inside Cost Anomaly Detection

StratoLens cost anomaly detection showing an Azure Firewall cost spike with a daily cost chart stepping up from its baseline, annotated as rising 229% overnight and flagged as a high severity billing anomaly — An anomaly detail view in the Contoso Financial demo environment, showing a hub firewall whose daily cost chart steps sharply upward from a long flat baseline. Shown with demo-environment data.

Pivoting from the anomaly to change tracking shows the route table modification that redirected traffic through the firewall, with the responsible service principal identified.

Detected anomalies across the estate, classified by severity and separated into cost increases and cost decreases.

Product demo

See it in action

Benefits

Key benefits

Detect cost spikes within days, not at month-end bill shock

Correlate cost changes with infrastructure modifications

Classify severity by percentage change and cost impact

Analyze 60+ days of historical cost data for trend detection

Use cases

Common use cases

Investigate unexpected cost spikes by viewing correlated infrastructure changes

Detect accidental resource provisioning or configuration changes that increased spending

Identify cost savings opportunities from resources with sudden cost drops

Self-hosted

Runs in your tenant. Reads everything, changes nothing.

StratoLens deploys from the Azure Marketplace into your own tenant and scans your subscriptions over read-only Azure APIs. The data behind Cost Anomaly Detection is collected and stored inside your tenant; there is no StratoLens cloud holding a copy.

Read-only scans via Azure management APIs
Every scan at rest in your tenant, never a vendor cloud
Deployed from the Azure Marketplace in under 15 minutes

Learn more about data residency and security architecture

Want the details?

Explore our documentation to see how Cost Anomaly Detection works in detail.

Read Documentation View All Features

From the Blog

Azure Cost Anomalies: Closing the Gap Between the Spike and the Discovery

Cost spikes often run for weeks before anyone notices. What Azure budgets and anomaly alerts catch, and how StratoLens ties spikes to their causes.

Read the article

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Every feature unlocked. Deploys to your Azure tenant. No data leaves your tenant.

When the 14 days end, billing starts on your Azure invoice at your tier. One toggle in Settings turns it off, any time.

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Not ready to install anything? Browse the Azure Footguns Database: 97 documented ways Azure quietly costs money or creates risk.