Azure's zombie disks haunt your cloud bill for $130 a month each—powershell script slays the orphaned resource ghosts before they eat your runway

Cloud Engineer Gavin Dobbs has identified a common issue in Azure billing, known as Orphaned Managed Disks, which can result in significant unnecessary costs. When a Virtual Machine is deleted in Azure, the default behavior often leaves the OS and Data disks behind, unattached and unused, yet still incurring monthly charges. To address this, Dobbs has created a PowerShell script that audits an entire tenant for these "zombie" resources by inspecting the ManagedBy property of each disk. The script, available on GitHub, scans all subscriptions and generates a CSV report, potentially uncovering thousands of dollars in wasted spend. For example, a standard Premium SSD (P30) can waste over $130/month per disk. This issue is significant in large environments, where the script can identify substantial cost savings in under 5 minutes. By using this tool, companies can optimize their Azure resources and reduce unnecessary expenses.