Getting complete size breakdown of storage blobs, file sizes etc, of azure storage account.

Question

I want to get the % storage breakdown of my azure storage account not on high level like containers and files shares which you can already see with insights on the capacity blade, but rather a bit deeper like what is the size of each blob with in the containers of the total container size.
What is the best and fastest approach to get this information?

Answer 1

Hi @Arno Pretorius CloudOps,

Thank you for reaching out on Microsoft Q&A forum.

If you need a per‑blob size breakdown (each blob’s contribution to container or account usage), Azure Storage Explorer is limited. Its Folder Statistics feature shows only folder or container‑level totals and can be slow or time out for large ADLS Gen2 accounts with millions of blobs, especially due to ACL traversal. It’s useful for quick, GUI‑based checks but not for detailed or large‑scale analysis.

For scalable and accurate blob‑level reporting, Azure Storage Blob Inventory is the recommended Microsoft‑native solution. Blob Inventory generates daily or weekly CSV or Parquet reports listing every blob with properties such as Content‑Length (size), access tier, snapshots, and versions. These reports can be easily analyzed using Excel, Power BI, Azure Synapse, or Databricks to calculate totals, percentages, and distributions across containers or prefixes. This approach is designed for large accounts with millions of blobs and is the most reliable option at scale. Docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/storage/blobs/blob-inventory

For ad‑hoc or small environments, Azure CLI or PowerShell can be used to list blobs and sum their sizes using properties.contentLength. However, each listing call returns a maximum of 5,000 blobs, so continuation tokens are required for larger containers, and the output is informational (not intended for billing). Docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/storage/scripts/storage-blobs-container-calculate-size-cli

• Sample CLI script (Bash/Azure Cloud Shell):

az storage blob list --account-name --container-name --include snapshots,versions --query "[].{Name:name,Size:properties.contentLength}"

Recommendation: Use Blob Inventory for large‑scale, production analysis; CLI/PowerShell for one‑off checks; and Storage Explorer only for quick container or folder‑level totals.

Kindly let us know if the above helps or you need further assistance on this issue.

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