Azure Backup tag without an object

[alaine]

Hello everyone,
we have the following situation:
We operate several Azure environments and back up the vms with the Veeam appliance. We have three VM backup policies, and these exist for all tenants. The scope of each policy is defined by a tag, for example, tag1 has a retention of 30 days, tag2 two months, and tag3 three months.

Depending on the customer, not every tag is used. Nevertheless, we create the jobs uniformly. However, in Azure the tags are only available if they are assigned to an object, so we get error messages that the tag does not exist and also a warning that no object with this tag is present.

To remove the error message, we assigned the tag to a network object. For about a month now, though, the tag can no longer be found on the network object.
We have also considered creating a VM and deleting the disks so that no additional costs would arise, but unfortunately Azure does not allow this.

What is the most cost-effective yet efficient solution here? How do others handle this?

[nielsengelen]

Hi,

I believe you can create a certain type of virtual machine size for quite some hours free per month (B1S for example). Have you looked at using these as a workaround turned off?

[alaine]

The powered-off VM incurs costs without providing any benefit to the customer.
We create three tags for three different backup policies, but if the customer uses only one backup tag, they still pay for a VM for the other two tags.
That doesn’t sound like an ideal solution to me.
How do other customers handle this? What is the official recommendation?