How to detect idle load balancers.
Idle Load Balancers 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.
Idle Load Balancers
Orphaned idle load balancers found in billing records with zero active workload associations over a rolling 30-day window.
Operational Description
Load balancers are deployed to distribute traffic across a backend pool of resources. If the backend pool becomes empty or if the backend virtual machines are deallocated, the load balancer continues to run and bill for basic deployment hours.
Primary Root Cause
Tearing down backend virtual machines or application service clusters while keeping the ingress load balancing rules and resources fully active.
How Costframe Detects & Verifies This
We audit Microsoft.Network/loadBalancers and cross-reference them with network packet metrics. Load balancers with zero backend instances or zero active connections are flagged.
Continuous cloud audits, automated
Run this detector and dozens of other cloud-waste rules across all your Azure subscriptions continuously.