What the Decision Pack covers

The Decision Pack arrives 7 days after read-only access. It explains the bill by service, gives you 3 to 5 decisions ranked by benefit, effort and risk, and lists what to leave alone, and why. Every finding carries six decision fields.

The lifecycle of the findings in a Decision Pack. A single cyan Infralign band, marked read-only and not a rules engine, spans a time axis of nightly, week one, and after the session, and holds three cards. First, a card with a cost-breakdown ring: step 1, read nightly, read-only, step 2, six detection types, tagged automated. Second, a card tagged done by a person: step 3, findings sized and prioritised, step 4, a working session with your team. That second card is the expert-led half of the work. Third, in green, a document card: step 5, the prioritised report, tagged what you leave with. A strip beneath lists the six fields every finding carries: euro impact, evidence, owner, effort, risk, next action. — Figure 1: Detection is automated. The Decision Pack is expert-led: a senior architect sizes and ranks every finding before it reaches your Pack.

How the Pack is built

Step	Owner	Observable outcome
1. Read the sources nightly	Infralign	The Data Ops dashboard shows current source dates.
2. Detect six finding types	Infralign	Candidate findings carry evidence from your estate.
3. Size and rank	Senior Azure architect	Each candidate has an impact estimate and a rank.
4. The 45-minute call	Your engineer and the architect	Each finding has an owner and an agreed next action.
5. Deliver the Pack	Infralign	Within the 7 days, engineering sees the findings 2 working days before finance.

What the Pack surfaces

Step 2 of figure 1 covers six detection types.

Category	Signal	Threshold	€ basis
Idle VMs	30-day rolling p95 CPU, with an idle-day count	p95 CPU under 5%	The spend the idle VMs carry
Rightsizing	30-day p95 CPU utilisation, with a confidence level per candidate	None	The saving on each shutdown or resize candidate
Reservations and Savings Plans	Commitment coverage per pool	60% coverage target	Eligible spend not covered by a commitment
Orphaned disks	Managed disks with no attached VM, still billing	None	What those disks still charge
Log optimisation	Over-provisioned logging and retention that can be trimmed without losing signal	None	The logging spend the trim releases
Azure Hybrid Benefit (AHB) licensing	Eligible Windows and SQL workloads not yet claiming the benefit	None	The licensing saving the benefit delivers

How the evidence is built

A rightsizing finding based only on billing data is a guess. The Pack combines Advisor with three operational signals:

30-day p95 CPU from Azure Monitor
idle-day counts
inventory from Azure Resource Graph

An architect checks each candidate against actual spend, architecture, and policy. Advisor is an input, not the output.

That review is step 3 in figure 1.

What you need to provide

Keep Azure connected through both required roles.
Bring your engineer to the 45-minute call.

Done when each ranked decision has an owner and a next action.

Clean tags are not required: billing and resource metadata are enough, and extra context improves ownership attribution.

What the Pack leaves out

The Pack is a cost review with architecture context. It does not include a penetration test, a general architecture review, or a compliance assessment.

The sample Decision Pack shows a finished one.