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What Exactly is Azure Cost Management?

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Azure Cost Management is a free solution offered to Azure cloud users through Azure Cost Management, which is accessible via the Azure portal. It provides details about the overall cost and usage across all Azure services as well as Azure Marketplace products. It provides insight as well as reports. It will also provide data about your organization’s use of other cloud service providers.

Once enabled, Azure Cost Management continuously tracks your resources and produces continuous reports. It’s possible to integrate Azure Cost Management with Azure Advisor and receive cost recommendations tailored to your needs. To further personalize your cost management, make use of REST APIs and connect with Microsoft Power BI.

Microsoft Azure Benefits Microsoft Azure Cost Management

Cost management in Azure can provide two main advantages for your business getting a better understanding of cloud spending, and helping you track costs to particular departments or initiatives.

Monitor and Optimize Azure Costs

Azure Cost Management lets you examine the past cloud usage and expensesand also predict future costs. Costs can be viewed in each day, month or annual pattern, to spot trends and irregularities and identify ways to improve efficiency and reduce costs. The data is directly from Azure which is why it displays the actual units on which your Azure cost is calculated.

It is expensive to build a Map Cloud for Departments or Initiatives

Azure Cost Management classifies your resources into multiple buckets based on an idea of cost entity. A cost entity refers to a particular department or project within your company that is responsible for paying on behalf of Azure Services. You may also design an cost model that organizes resources in accordance with labels that the teams applied to the current Azure resources.

After you have properly defined Cost entities, models and costs, the teams can make use of Azure Cost Management to view and study costs associated with their project budgets. It is also possible to set budgets and alerts that warn or restrict overuse of teams, projects or a specific user.

4 Ways to Optimize Azure Costs using Azure Cost Management and related tools

Azure Cost Management is designed to assist organizations in locating under-utilized resources, eliminate waste and reduce expenses.

Cost Analysis Report

The Cost Analysis report in Azure Cost Management allows you to examine your company’s expenses in depth, separating costs by using Azure the attributes of resources.

Here are a few examples of the kinds of questions you can use the cost analysis report to answer: report:

What are the expenses this month? See how much you have spent and whether the different cost organizations are in their budget.

Are there cost-related irregularities? Verify the use of services in a way that is unusual or price increases and ensure that the costs are within a reasonable range and appropriate for normal use.

Does the amount you are invoiced match what you is expected? Verify your Azure invoice against the actual use of services and verify that billing is as you anticipated. Check if there are major changes from prior months and look into them.

How can we split costs between departments/cost entities? Find out how Azure costs should be divided between projects, organizational units, or individuals.

Azure Budgets

The budgets function of Azure Cost Management lets you establish a budget to Azure services, based on cost or usage. Budgets should be reviewed often to see if specific budgets are not being met and make any necessary adjustments.

Azure Budget also allows you to configure triggers with automated functions for improved cloud governance. For instance, if certain budget thresholds are exceeded it is possible to configure the service to stop VMs when budget limits are over. You may also change your infrastructure to different service tiers based on budget triggers.

Azure Pricing Calculator

Azure Pricing Calculator can be frequently employed in conjunction with Azure Cost Management, to assess pricing for various types of Azure services. This is useful when you are deploying new workloads in Azure, or significantly expanding existing workloads.

There are many options to run a specific application or service using Azure, and different options for services, service tiers or options can have an enormous impact on costs. You can use the Pricing Calculator to estimate the costs of different configurations and get a better understanding of pricing for future uses of Azure.

Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor is an Azure Advisor service that can help you find areas for cost savings in Azure, including:

Virtual machines underutilized, specifically in terms of CPU or network utilization. Then, you can decide to shut them down or change the size of the VMs.
reserved Instances (RIs) in VMs which have been running consistently for a long period of time.
Removing unused network resources such as ExpressRoute networks, virtual network gateways and public IPs.
Optimize database use through proper-sizing MariaDB, MySQL or PostgreSQL instances.

Azure Cost Management Q&A

How Do I Enable Azure Cost Management?

To enable Azure Cost Management for authorized users:

Access the Azure portal with an account for an administrator of enterprises.
On the left menu select Cost Management + Billing
Select Billing scopes, then select your billing account
Select Settings, then select Policies from the menu.
Select the user you wish to allow access to, by setting the Access Costs option to On

Is Azure Cost Management Free?

Yes, customers and partners of Azure are able to use Azure Cost Management for free to control your Azure costs. The Azure portal offers Azure Cost Management, and additional free tools that can assist you in managing your spending and budget, such as the Azure Price Calculator, Azure Advisor, as well as Azure Migrate.