I want to delete storage account in azure before deleting what are the things we need to check in the azure

Question

we need to understand if we are good to clean up the old logs from that storage account

Answer 1

Hi , I understand you are cleaning up resources and are worried about deleting a storage account that might be being used by another service. There are a few ways to check the dependencies of an Azure storage account before deleting it. One way is to use Azure Monitor Storage insights to view the transaction, latency, and capacity details of your storage accounts and see if they are being used by any other resources. When you delete a storage account in the portal you should be able to see if there are any resources inside that storage account and the total data stored.

If you do delete a storage account and then recreate it, any other services or apps that rely on that storage account will receive an error. Even if the storage account is recreated it will have a different and unique resource id. Those previously dependent services will not have the proper permissions to write to that storage account. Hope this answers your questions. Let me know if you have any other questions or need further assistance.

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Answer 2

Hi @Tamil Selvan M - Welcome to Microsoft Q&A Forum, thank you for posting your query here!

In case you plan to delete a storage account, you need to verify that you are not consuming that account such as configured for some application or with any service or something.

You can start by verifying if transactions are happening on the account. If not, the probably there are no current active calls coming however you should still verify from the application side too.

A high-level view of transaction happening can also be checked from Monitoring -> Metrics -> Select Transaction as Metrics. For more robust details regarding operations such as Request URI, Client IP, User Agent etc, you can further explore via diagnostic logging too.

Storage insights provides comprehensive monitoring of your Azure Storage accounts by delivering a unified view of your Azure Storage services performance, capacity, and transactions etc. You can navigate to Monitoring -> Insights -> Overview tab (for Transaction Data)

You can review the below links as well: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/monitor-blob-storage-reference https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-insights-overview https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/monitor-blob-storage?tabs=azure-portal https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/blob-storage-monitoring-scenarios Another check is to do for any kind of active Immutable Policy as that might also restrict the account deletion based on complaince. The above options shall help in taking further actions ahead.

Kindly let me know if you have any further queries. I’m happy to assist you further. Please do not forget to "Accept the answer” and “up-vote” wherever the information provided helps you, this can be beneficial to other community members.

Answer 3

Hello Tamil Selvan M,

Greetings! Welcome to Microsoft Q&A Forum.

Adding to above information, there are certain prerequisites you need to check before deleting a Storage Account.

As you mentioned you would like to clean the logs, check if there are any retention policies in place for your logs. Retention policies determine how long logs are retained before they are automatically deleted and ensure that you’re not violating any compliance requirements by deleting.

If version-level immutability support is enabled for the storage account and the account contains one or more containers, then you must delete all containers before you delete the storage account, even if there are no immutability policies in effect for the account or containers.

Now, HERE are steps to Modify or delete an unlocked retention policy. If there are any legal holds on the data, here are steps to clear the same as well.

Ensure you have backed up all critical data stored in the account. This includes databases, virtual machines, and any other files. Use Azure’s backup services or manually export data to a secure location.

Check if any scheduled tasks or processes relying on the storage account are disabled before deletion.

If using classic VMs, delete them first. When deleting a classic VM, ensure that the “Disks” checkbox is selected. Breaking the disk lease associated with the page blob .vhd allows you to delete the actual page blob file from the storage account.

Remove associated disks: Classic VMs retain a lease on the .vhd file until their associated disks are deleted. Once the disk lease is broken, you can delete the page blob itself. A storage account or container can be deleted once all “Disk” resources within them are deleted.

Hope this answer helps!