Understanding billing for the Azure Copilot Observability Agent

The Azure Copilot Observability Agent brings an agentic investigation experience directly into Azure Monitor. Teams can chat with their observability data, run deep investigations across application and infrastructure signals, and, in preview, use autonomous operations to correlate alerts and create issues for review. The common thread across these experiences is that the agent performs AI work on behalf of the user or configured workflow, and that work has a cost. Azure Copilot Observability Agent billing went into effect July 1, 2026.

This post explains the billing model at a practical level: what is measured, which agent operations are billable today, how usage appears to users, and how this differs from the standard Azure Monitor costs customers already manage for telemetry ingestion, retention, alerting, and other monitoring capabilities. For current list pricing and the most detailed billing guidance, always refer to the official billing documentation and the Azure Monitor pricing page.

A consumption-based model for agentic work

The Observability Agent uses a consumption-based pricing model: customers pay for the AI work the agent performs. This consumption is measured in Azure Agent Credits, or AAC. AAC provides a consistent unit for agent work across models and tokens used. 

AAC is designed to reflect the amount of agentic processing required to complete a task. Simple questions, such as "what was the maximum latency of this app yesterday?", typically use few tokens. A deep investigation consumes more agent and tool work, and therefore typically incurs higher cost.

Note that a single agent operation - be it a chat question or a deep investigation - is currently capped at 500 AACs.

Charges are scoped to the Azure subscription of the monitored resource, or to the subscription of the named agent instance if one is used (required for autonomous operations). This keeps the cost associated with the environment where the agent is being used, and lets teams review agent consumption alongside other subscription-level Azure costs. 

What is billable today

There are three main usage patterns to understand. 

• Chat - the agent's chat allows users to explore and analyze their observability data through natural-language questions about their Azure resources and their logs, metrics, traces, or related telemetry, and the agent performs the work needed to answer. This is typically the lowest-cost pattern because the scope is often focused and iterative. 
• Deep investigation - can be initiated through a number of entry points in the Azure Portal, and also through the chat (users can tell the agent to run a deep investigation). A deep investigation performs a broader analysis - it gathers signals, correlates findings, reasons across application, infrastructure, and Azure platform context, and produces an investigation report. Because this workflow runs multiple agent and tool steps, it typically consumes more AAC than chat. 
• Autonomous operations are currently in preview. Autonomous alert processing, triage and optional correlation can run in the background to group related alerts and reduce noise. Alert correlation itself isn’t billed during preview. If autonomous operations automatically run a deep investigation on an agent-created issue, that deep investigation is billable. This is an important distinction: preview correlation and issue creation are different from the investigation work that may be triggered as part of that flow.

How users see usage in the product

Cost transparency is part of the experience. After the agent returns a response in chat, users can open the usage indicator (hexagon-shaped icon) located next to the thumbs-up/down icons, to see how many AACs were used to generate that response. This makes consumption visible at the point where the user sees the value of the answer, rather than only later in a billing report.

This is especially useful because not all agent interactions are equal. A short question that summarizes a recent trend can require much less agent work than a long-running investigation that reviews multiple signals and hypotheses. Showing AAC usage per response helps users understand that relationship and adjust how they use the agent when needed.

How costs appear in Azure Cost Management

Teams can review the overall agent cost in subscription Cost Management. The product name appears as Azure Monitor Observability Agent, and the meter name appears as Observability Agent Azure Agent Credits. 

This gives admins a familiar place to monitor consumption. The agent cost is not a replacement for standard Azure Monitor charges. Existing Azure Monitor costs — such as logs ingestion, retention, alerting, web tests, and other metered monitoring capabilities — continue to follow their own billing models.

Through Cost Analysis smart views, such as Services, users can select the Azure Monitor service and review specific entries of the Azure Monitor Observability Agent. 

Practical guidance for teams

Start by using chat for focused exploration: ask about trends, errors, performance, anomalies, or a specific resource. Use deep investigations when you need a broader, multi-signal analysis of an incident or suspected root cause. 

Review the AAC usage shown after agent responses so users can build intuition about which prompts stay lightweight and which workflows require deeper analysis. 

Use Azure Cost Management to monitor the subscription-level cost of agent usage, and keep the Observability Agent cost distinct from standard Azure Monitor telemetry costs such as logs ingestion, retention, alerting, and web tests. 

For current pricing details, billable behavior, and any updates to what is billed in preview or GA experiences, use the official billing documentation as the source of truth.

Coming up...

Looking ahead, we plan to introduce billing caps for the Observability Agent, giving customers greater control over monthly token consumption, capacity usage, and overall costs.

Learn more

• Billing and cost management for Azure Copilot Observability Agent
• Azure Copilot Observability Agent overview
• Chat with your observability data
• Deep investigations in the Azure Copilot Observability Agent
• Autonomous operations in the Observability Agent
• Azure Monitor pricing

We’d love your feedback

The Observability Agent continues to evolve based on real-world usage and operator feedback. Share feedback through the Give Feedback option in the product, or reach us at noakuper@microsoft.com.