When you manage cloud infrastructure, hidden and idle resources can quietly drive up your bill. These costs often go unnoticed because certain resources continue to incur charges even when they are not actively used or easily visible in day-to-day operations. Understanding what to look for is the first step in controlling these expenses. Common sources of hidden costs in the cloud include:

• Orphaned disks: storage volumes that are no longer attached to any virtual machine (VM) but still persist and accumulate charges;
• Idle IP addresses: public IPs that are allocated but not attached to running resources, which can result in ongoing fees;
• Zombie VMs: virtual machines that are running but not performing any meaningful work, often forgotten after a testing or migration project;
• Underutilized services: resources that are provisioned for maximum capacity but consistently operate well below their potential, such as oversized databases or load balancers.

Each of these can become a silent drain on your cloud budget if not regularly monitored and addressed.

To interpret a cloud inventory report and flag potential waste, follow these steps:

1. Review all storage volumes for those marked as Available and not attached to any VM; these are likely orphaned disks;
2. Identify VMs with a status of Stopped or Running but with little or no usage; stopped VMs may still incur storage costs, while running VMs with no attached services could be zombie instances;
3. Examine IP addresses that are Allocated but not In-use; these idle IPs can be released to avoid unnecessary charges;
4. Check database and load balancer resources for low or zero usage, especially if they are not connected to any application. These underutilized services should be downsized or decommissioned;
5. Cross-reference the UsageLast30Days column with the resource status to prioritize which resources to investigate or clean up first.

By systematically working through these steps, you can uncover hidden cost drivers and take action to reduce your cloud spend.