$30/Day Wasted on Logs Nobody Read. 200 Servers. One Rule. Zero Filtering.

$30 a day in wasted log ingestion. Information-level logs from 200+ servers pouring into Log Analytics. All billed. None actionable. Pure waste that went unquestioned for months. The root cause was one monolithic Data Collection Rule collecting everything from every Windows server in the fleet. Active Directory logs, DNS logs, DFS replication - all of it from over 200 machines. But only 6 of those machines were actual Domain Controllers. The rest were generating noise. Information-level event logs are the noisiest, most expensive, and least useful data in your entire stack. That means roughly 97% of that collection was paying for events that would never trigger an alert or answer a question anyone was asking. The fix was splitting the monolithic DCR into two specialized rules: Domain Controller logs collected from the 6 actual DCs only, and information-level logs eliminated entirely. Same monitoring coverage. A fraction of the cost. $30 a day is over $900 a month. And this is just one project at one company. Every organization running Azure Monitor with default Data Collection Rules is probably doing the same thing. Check your log ingestion costs right now. Filter by table. Look…