Every month when I receive my Azure bill I take a careful look at it to see if there is anything I can optimise. This month I saw that the top cost was from my Log analytics workspace as you can see above. This however was no surprise because it basically represents that amount of data that had been ingested from my remote workstations into Azure Sentinel for analysis.

When I looked at Azure Sentinel I can see that I am bringing in more performance logs than security events per day. Now the question is, am I really getting value from having that much ingestion of performance logging? Probably not, so I want to go and turn it down a notch and not ingest quite so much and hopefully, save me a few dollars.

To do this, I’ll need to log into the Azure Portal and then go to Log Analytics workspaces.

I’ll then need to select Advanced settings from the menu on the left.

First thing I checked was in Data, Windows Event Logs is that I’m only capturing the errors in the Application and System logs for the devices, which I was.

Next I went to Windows Performance Counters and adjusted the sample time limit. I have increased it to every 10 minutes for now to see what difference that makes. I could also remove or add certain performance counters here if I wanted but I wanted to work with the current baseline.

With all that done, I’ll wait and see what the cost differences are in next month’s invoice and adjust again if necessary.