Azure Cost Management — How to keep an eye on your Azure costs
Having an overview of the costs of a cloud solution is essential, as anyone can understand. It also helps to plan future steps and investments and to identify savings opportunities. This is where integrated cost management comes in handy with regards to Azure. This short article will provide an overview of the possibilities offered by Azure.
Prerequisite to view the cost management is read access on the Billing Account, Department, Enrollment Account, Management Group, Subscription or Resource Group.
If you navigate to the Azure portal, you can choose between the following categories in the cost portal.
Cost Analysis
The tab for the cost analysis gives us information about the costs within a certain period of time.
It is possible to see the development of costs for any period of time. The costs can either be cumulated or listed per day/month. The filter option lets us group the results by location, resource group, resource type, day or name to name a few. All results can also be displayed graphically using different graphic variants.
Advisor Recommendations
The recommendations of the Azure Advisor show various optimization possibilities, in this case with regard to possible cost savings. For example, if a virtual machine only needs a fraction of the power permanently, costs can be saved by downscaling.
Budgets
By defining budgets, it is possible to be informed if a budget limit is exceeded or approached (e.g per Email). There is a daily check between the budget already consumed and the budget still outstanding. There is the option to set an annual, quarterly or monthly budget. A quarterly budget is characterized by the fact that it is distributed evenly over 3 months. In addition, there is a graphical representation of the expenditure per category compared to the fixed budget. Up to five email addresses can be stored, which receive the budget information and alerts.
Cloudyn
Cloudyn is a service offered by a subsidiary of Microsoft. From the Azure portal you will be redirected to the corresponding Cloudyn page. Here you have to register the company first. Users can then be added as required. With Cloudyn not only Azure but also Google or AWS accounts can be added and their costs monitored.
For Cloudyn there are free services for Azure customers. These are various functionalities for cost management as well as reporting, data enrichment, budgets, alerting and recommendations. There are also extended premium services, which, however, incur costs.
Cloudyn offers a nice additional option to extend the already existing functionalities of Azure. For example, there is also the possibility to clearly prepare the data using a dashboard.
API’s
Furthermore, all data can be queried programmatically using the accounting APIs provided by Azure. ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/cost-management/)
Conclusion
So there are many ways we can keep track of our Azure costs. Many functionalities such as alerting are available “Out of the Box” and free of charge. This shows that Microsoft understands how important the topic is and therefore pays attention to low complexity, good documentation and large variation. If you want to dive deeper, the API’s and Cloudyn offer a good possibility.
