Anyone who oversees the management of workloads in Azure should be knowledgeable about Azure cost management. Additionally, it is the name of a free Azure tool that aids in cost visualization and forecasting, finding anomalies, and finding opportunities for optimization for Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) products in the Azure cloud.
In this post, we’ll go through what the Azure Cost Management service offers, how it functions, and which other Azure services can assist you in understanding and lowering your cloud costs.
What is the Azure Cost Management Service?
The Azure Cost Management Service is the first to provide visibility into your Azure spending and usage. This service enables you to understand where your costs are going, how they’re growing, and how you can reduce them.
The Azure Cost Management Service provides a detailed view of your Azure spending with automated forecasting and alerting capabilities. You can also use this service to manage multiple subscriptions within your organization so that you can get a better understanding of where your money is going.
The service is available at no additional cost to all Azure customers, can be managed from any web browser, and does not require a subscription change or license key addition.
Understand Azure Billing
Azure Reviewing your invoiced expenses and controlling access to billing data are done using billing features. Billing tasks are often handled by larger firms’ procurement and finance teams.
A billing account is generated as soon as you register to utilize Azure. Your billing account keeps track of expenditures, handles payments, and manages invoices. Access to several billing accounts is possible. For instance, you might have enrolled in Azure for your projects. As a result, you can have a billing account for a single Azure subscription.
The Enterprise Agreement for your company or the Microsoft Customer Agreement may also grant you access. You would have a different billing account for each situation.
Understanding Azure Cost Management
With cutting-edge analytics, cost management displays organizational cost and utilization patterns. The usage-based charges incurred by Azure services and third-party Marketplace offerings are displayed in reports under Cost Management. Reservation and Azure Hybrid Benefit discounts are considered, and costs are based on negotiated rates. The reports display your usage-related internal and external costs and Azure Marketplace fees.
Support and taxes are two additional costs that have not yet been included in reports. You can identify spending abnormalities and better understand your resource usage with the aid of the reports. There is also predictive analytics accessible. Azure management groups, budgets, and recommendations are used in cost management to display how your spending is set up and offer suggestions for cost-cutting measures.
With Azure Cost Management, you can:
- Analyze usage patterns to identify areas where cost can be reduced or optimized.
- Identify and fix billing errors.
- Ensure compliance with corporate policies for spending and security.
- Understand how changes in your cloud use affect costs.
Benefits of Microsoft Azure Cost Management
Microsoft Azure Cost Management enables you to:
Monitor and Optimize Azure Costs
You can easily see how much you spend on Microsoft Azure resources, including compute, storage and bandwidth. You can also track usage over time by month or year. This helps you identify trends and make better decisions about your cloud usage.
Detailed Usage Information
You can view your resource consumption over time, region, and service. You can also see how much you spend on each resource — for example, what percentage of your total spend comprises storage resources?
Map Cloud Costs to Departments or Initiatives
You can map cloud costs to departments or initiatives to see how much each department spends on the cloud. This makes it easy to determine if your organization is using the right resources for its workloads, which allows you to make more informed decisions about how much should be allocated to each initiative.
Azure Cost Optimization With Cost Management and Related Tools
Azure offers many cost management and related tools that you can use to keep a close eye on your Azure bills. These tools help you optimize the costs you pay for your cloud resources, enabling you to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your Azure deployments.
Cost Analysis Report
The Cost Analysis report provides a detailed view of how much each service has cost you in the past month. It also shows you future costs based on current utilization trends. You can access the report from any Billing Portal page by clicking View Estimated Bill under the Cost Analysis section of the page.
Azure Budgets
Budgets allow you to track spending on specific services over time without logging in every day or week to check your usage. Budgets are available for all subscription plans except Basic, which does not support budgets.
Azure Pricing Calculator
The Azure Pricing Calculator is a handy tool for determining the cost of using Microsoft Azure. It’s simple to use and will allow you to estimate how much your subscription will cost per month. This can help you plan for future expenses and ensure you get the most value out of your investment.
Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor is a tool that analyzes your applications running in Azure and any VMs created from them to identify areas where you can optimize your costs. This can include identifying which VMs are underutilized or not being used, determining which features aren’t being used, finding unused resources, and more.
Azure Cost Alerts
Azure Cost Alerts help you monitor and manage costs in Azure. You can create alerts for individual resources or groups of resources, and the alerts will trigger when a specified threshold has been exceeded.
Budget Alerts
Budget alerts notify you when you are approaching your monthly spending targets. You can set budget alert levels based on current usage or future projected spending and choose between daily or weekly notifications. Budget alerts work with most Azure services, including Azure Analytics and SQL Database (Standard and Premium tiers).
Credit Alerts
Credit alerts notify you when your account balance falls below a specified amount or percentage of your available credit limit. When an account reaches its credit limit, no additional charges are allowed until the account balance increases above the credit limit again. Credit alerts apply to all regions (except China), but they do not apply to Consumption Plan (preview) accounts.
Wrapping Up
Watch out for updates to Azure Cost Management on Twitter, where they frequently post interesting articles and advice on getting the most out of the service.
Feel free to contact Awsom LLC for additional assistance and guidance. A Consulting Partner helps you maximize the value of your cloud platform. You can rely on them for help in creating and implementing cloud-based applications.
