# Azure SQL VM Idle -- Low Network Activity > Azure SQL VMs that move under 1 GiB of combined network traffic in 30 days, carry a positive dev/test signal, and have a measured idle heatmap get an off-hours schedule recommendation from RC-269. Savings equal monthly cost times the measured idle fraction; without schedule data the rule abstains entirely. Source: https://zop.dev/integrations/azure/recommendations/azure-sql-vm-idle-low-network-activity Updated: 2026-08-19 --- ## 1 GiB in a month is the whole bar The fire trigger is combined VMNetworkIn plus VMNetworkOut under 1 GiB cumulative across a 30-day window, an average of roughly 0.4 KiB per second. Any live SQL workload's heartbeat traffic, AlwaysOn synchronization, or even idle ODBC probes sit above that, which is the point: the threshold is set so a quiet-but-used warehouse does not trip it. Because a SQL VM resource has no platform metrics of its own, the aggregator harvests these series from the paired compute VM (readable with **Monitoring Reader**), and the gate is computed from the full collection window, so a VM busy three weeks ago but quiet lately is not flagged. ## Only positively-identified non-prod machines qualify Low network alone cannot distinguish an abandoned box from a standby replica, so RC-269 requires a *positive* non-production signal: a dev/test environment tag, a dev/test name, or a dev/test resource group. A production env tag vetoes absolutely. An earlier revision fired on the mere absence of a prod signal, which meant a production SQL VM with a neutral name got a park recommendation; the current gate fails closed instead. A VM with a known recurring schedule already in place, or one whose uptime shows it is already mostly off, is also skipped as redundant. ## The lever is a schedule, and the dollars are measured A one-shot deallocate on a running VM is an outage, not a saving, so the recommendation is a recurring off-hours start/stop schedule. The dollar figure comes exclusively from the aggregator's heatmap-derived idle measurement for this specific VM: savings = monthly cost × measured idle fraction. No heatmap data, or a zero idle fraction, means the rule abstains. An earlier fabricated flat 0.67 multiplier was removed on principle. Missing pricing also abstains. Note that managed-disk storage keeps billing while the VM is stopped; only compute pauses. Applying the schedule uses the **Zopnight Write Access** custom role (`start/action` and `deallocate/action` on the VM). ## Pull the same traffic numbers ```bash az monitor metrics list --resource \ --metric "Network In Total" "Network Out Total" \ --aggregation Total --interval PT24H --offset 30d \ --query "value[].timeseries[].data[].total" -o tsv ``` Sum the two columns; under 1,073,741,824 bytes total reproduces the rule's verdict. ## Everything that makes it stay silent Abstains: metrics absent (rollout gap or permissions), zero total bytes (a deallocated VM, which other rules own), traffic at or above 1 GiB, no positive non-prod signal, an existing schedule, long-off uptime, missing pricing, or missing schedule data. Low severity is deliberate: network quiet is a weak idle proxy, and the remediation asks you to check connection and query activity before parking anything.