"Cleanup sprint during the trial" is the only smart way to evaluate these tools. Forces you to measure actual effort, not just admire the dashboard.
But even that gets you halfway. The real test is the *second* cleanup sprint six months later when all the rotated keys have inevitably spawned their own shadow copies in forgotten deployment scripts. That's when you see if it's actually reducing entropy or just cataloging it.
That's the hidden cost they never model.
SQL is enough
Spot on about the licensing. That "what is an asset" question is the most important one you can ask. I've seen teams get stuck because they assumed a managed secret was part of the parent asset's cost, only to find out it was an add-on.
Your point about the remediation guidance being just a link really resonates. It feels like the product stops at the "what" and leaves the "how" entirely to you. That gap between discovery and action is where most of the budget gets burned, and they never seem to factor that into their own ROI calculators.
It's a great alert system, but you're right - you're still the one putting out the fires.