Azure Cost Management is a free solution offered to Azure cloud customers via the Azure portal. It provides information about your overall costs and utilization across all Azure services and Azure Marketplace products. The solution provides insights and reports, and can also provide data about your organization’s use of other cloud providers.
Once enabled, Azure Cost Management continuously monitors your resources and provides ongoing reports. You can integrate Azure Cost Management with Azure Advisor, and gain cost recommendations tailored to your usage. To further customize your cost management, you can use REST APIs and integrate with Microsoft Power BI.
This is part of our series of articles on Azure Pricing.
In this article, you will learn:
Azure cost management can have two key benefits for your organization: gaining visibility over cloud spending, and helping you map costs to specific departments or initiatives.
Azure Cost Management lets you analyze past cloud usage and expenses, and predict future expenses. You can view costs in a daily, monthly, or annual trend, to identify trends and anomalies, and find opportunities for optimization and savings. This data comes directly from Azure so it shows the actual units on which your Azure bill is based.
Azure Cost Management classifies your resources into multiple buckets using the concept of cost entities. A cost entity is a department or project in your organization that pays for Azure services. You can also create a cost model that structures resources according to tags that teams have applied to the actual Azure resources.
Once you have correctly defined cost entities and models, teams can use Azure Cost Management to view and investigate costs associated with their specific project budgets. You can also set budgets and alerts to warn or limit overuse for projects, teams, or specific users.
Azure Cost Management is designed to help organizations find underutilized resources, eliminate waste and reduce costs.
The Cost Analysis report in Azure Cost Management allows you to analyze your organization's costs in detail, segmenting costs using Azure resource attributes.
Here are a few examples of questions you can answer with the cost analysis report:
Source: Azure
The Budgets function within Azure Cost Management lets you set a budget for Azure services, based on cost or usage. You should revisit budgets on a regular basis to see if specific budgets have run out and make changes as needed.
Azure Budget also allows you to configure automated triggers for better cloud governance. So for example, when certain budget thresholds are reached, you can configure a service to shut down VMs when the budget is exceeded. You can also switch your infrastructure to different service tiers based on budget triggers.
Source: Azure
Azure Pricing Calculator is commonly used alongside Azure Cost Management, to evaluate pricing for different combinations of Azure services. This is valuable when deploying new workloads in Azure, or significantly expanding existing workloads.
There are many ways to run a specific application or service in Azure, and different services, service tiers or options can have a major effect on costs. You can use the Pricing Calculator to simulate costs for different configurations, and understand pricing for future use of Azure.
Azure Advisor is a service that can identify opportunities for cost savings on Azure, including:
Source: Azure
To enable Azure Cost Management for authorized users:
Yes, customers and partners of Azure can use Azure Cost Management for free to manage their Azure costs. The Azure portal provides Azure Cost Management, and additional free tools that can help you manage your spend, including the Azure Price Calculator, Azure Advisor, and Azure Migrate.
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