Recently with one of my clients, I’ve been tasked to work with a 3rd party vendor to go through all data assets for my client. at first it seems an easy task but not when you deal with more than 500 storage accounts and huge data volume e.g. hundreds of petabytes!

In this post I would like to explain one great feature in azure storage account and in another post will share some required feature that needs to be added to this to make life easier in such scenarios

Azure Blob Storage Inventory is a functionality within the Azure Storage Account that gives a comprehensive view of the items in your blob storage. It generates a CSV file that catalogs all your blobs along with their related metadata. Depending on your setup, this file is produced daily or weekly and is saved in a designated blob storage container.

It is under Data Management section of you azure storage account on Azure Portal.

More on this on Microsoft Docs

The Inventory is beneficial for a variety of applications such as tracking data growth over periods, data analysis, confirming encryption status, audit inspections, among others. It facilitates effective management and examination of your blob storage, particularly when dealing with substantial data volumes.

The inventory report incorporates information such as the blob’s name, the name of the blob container, the type and tier of the blob, the last time it was modified, when it was created, its content length, and other blob attributes. It offers high levels of customization, enabling you to add or remove specific blobs or containers as per your needs.

After creating your first inventory rule, you will have your inventory report file generated for each storage account. You can then process all of these files in a warehouse and generate nice report about your data assets using power bi.