azure-cost-optimization

azure-cost-optimization is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator. It costs 86 tokens per session (1,222 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for finding Azure cost-saving opportunities by comparing spending with actual resource usage. It looks for unused resources, oversized resources, and service-specific optimization opportunities.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to identify orphaned resources, rightsize VMs and containers, review Redis costs, and create a cost-optimization report before any remediation.
Why use it?
It helps show where an Azure subscription may be spending more than necessary and grounds recommendations in real cost and utilization data.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to identify orphaned resources, rightsize VMs and containers, review Redis costs, and create a cost-optimization report before any remediation.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/azure-cost-optimization
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator --skill azure-cost-optimization
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for azure-cost-optimization

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/azure-cost-optimization/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/azure-cost-optimization)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/azure-cost-optimization"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/azure-cost-optimization/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for azure-cost-optimization

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/azure-cost-optimization"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator/azure-cost-optimization.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,222 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Prompt Injection · line 42
    Large whitespace padding was detected (a block of blank lines or a long run of spaces). This can push injected instructions below or to the right of the visible area so a human reviewer never sees them while the agent still reads them. Manual review of the hidden content is recommended.
    Fix: Remove the large whitespace padding (blank-line blocks or long space runs) and review any content hidden below or to the right of it. Keep skill files compact and reviewable so no instructions can be
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00086 $0.01222
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.00611
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00244
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00122

Measured 7d ago against content hash b3ae8f1922d4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

azure-cost-optimization scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.github/skills/azure-cost-optimization/SKILL.md · 91 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 91 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Azure Cost Optimization Skill

Analyze Azure subscriptions to identify cost savings through orphaned resource cleanup, rightsizing, and optimization recommendations based on actual usage data.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when the user asks to:

  • Optimize Azure costs or reduce spending
  • Analyze Azure subscription for cost savings
  • Generate cost optimization report
  • Find orphaned or unused resources
  • Rightsize Azure VMs, containers, or services
  • Identify where they're overspending in Azure
  • Optimize Redis costs specifically - See Azure Redis Cost Optimization for Redis-specific analysis

Rules

  • Read-only analysis first — never delete or modify resources during the assessment phase; remediation is a separate user-approved step
  • Validate prerequisites before starting (Azure CLI authenticated, costmanagement + resource-graph extensions, azqr installed, Cost Management Reader + Monitoring Reader + Reader roles)
  • Use real data — recommendations must be grounded in actual cost queries and utilization metrics, not assumptions
  • Cite sources — every savings estimate must reference the underlying cost query or pricing API result (audit trail in output/cost-query-result<timestamp>.json)
  • Classify safely — mark recommendations as Safe / Review / Risky; never auto-apply destructive operations
  • Redis-specific scope — when the user asks about Redis only, follow Azure Redis Cost Optimization instead of the general subscription workflow
  • Save artifacts to output/costoptimizereport<timestamp>.md and the audit trail JSON
  • Out of scope: deploying resources (use azure-deploy), security issues (use azure-compliance), general diagnostics (use azure-diagnostics)

Instructions

High-level step list (full procedure in references/workflow-steps.md):

# Step Reference
0 Validate prerequisites (Azure CLI, costmanagement + resource-graph extensions, azqr, RBAC) workflow-steps.md
1 Load Azure cost-optimization best practices via mcp_azure-mcp_get_azure_bestpractices workflow-steps.md
1.5 (Conditional) Redis-specific analysis branch azure-redis.md
1.6 (Redis branch) Choose analysis scope (subscription / prefix / tenant-wide) azure-redis.md
2 Run Azure Quick Review (extension_azqr) for orphaned-resource discovery azure-quick-review.md
3 Discover resources cross-subscription via Azure Resource Graph azure-resource-graph.md
4–9 Cost queries, pricing validation, metrics, report, audit trail, cleanup detailed-workflow-steps.md

Read the full file on GitHub · 91 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 91 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A b3ae8f1922d4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

azure-cost-optimization is a skill published in the GitHub repository jonathan-vella/apex-accelerator (50 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 1,222 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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