CF-AZ-PS-07PaaS

How to detect empty app service plans.

Empty App Service Plans can quietly add recurring Azure cost when resource state, utilization, or lifecycle policy no longer matches real usage. This guide explains why it costs money, how to find it manually, and how Costframe detects it read-only.

CF-AZ-PS-07 • DETECTOR TYPE

Empty App Service Plans

Impact: High
Resource: staging-app-plan
+€160.00/mo
Utilization Telemetry
0 IOPS / Low utilization detected
Audit Rationale

Orphaned empty app service plans found in billing records with zero active workload associations over a rolling 30-day window.

Operational Description

An App Service Plan represents the underlying compute and memory capacity allocated to run App Service web applications. If all web applications are deleted from the plan, the underlying plan compute continues to run and bill.

Primary Root Cause

Deleting the individual web apps (apps) but neglecting to remove the underlying App Service Plan tier hosting them.

How Costframe Detects & Verifies This

We scan Microsoft.Web/serverfarms and check the number of active site resources bound to the plan. Plans with an active app count of 0 are flagged.

Evidence:Hosted Web Apps: 0 • Plan billing tier: Standard (S1).

Continuous cloud audits, automated

Run this detector and dozens of other cloud-waste rules across all your Azure subscriptions continuously.