A 20-line PowerShell snippet scans every subscription, flags ADF factories that haven’t executed a pipeline in 30 days, and hands you a clean-up hit-list in seconds. By Dieter Gobeyn.
This blog post provides overview of:
- Zero-run ADF factories still accrue IR, logging, and governance costs.
- “Unused” = no pipeline execution in last 30 days (configurable).
- One self-contained PowerShell script; read-only, no extra modules.
- Iterates all subscriptions, outputs table with subscription, RG, name, tags.
- Safe for Reader roles; can be scheduled in Azure Automation.
- Extend script to pipeline-level or different time windows as needed.
- Clean-up decisions remain manual—pair output with tagging/owner process.
Stale ADF pipelines bloat your tenant: they burn IR capacity, inflate log ingestion, confuse engineers, and widen the blast-radius of a security breach. Gobeyn’s post supplies a single, self-contained PowerShell script that enumerates every subscription, queries the ADF activity log for runs in the last 30 days, and returns a table of “zero-run” factories together with resource-group, subscription, and tags. Run it, eyeball the list, delete or disable—no external tools, no cost, no excuses. Perfect for FinOps squads, SREs, and data-platform owners who need a quick hygiene win before the next funding review. Nice one!
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