Discover cost management opportunities using tailored Copilot in Azure prompts

Copilot in Azure is revolutionizing the AI landscape by empowering users with intuitive, intelligent tools that enhance productivity, creativity, and decision-making across various industries. By weaving AI-powered functionality within Microsoft Cost Management, Copilot in Azure adds significant value to your organization to analyze, optimize, simulate, and provide insight into your cloud spending and maximize your ROI.

Leveraging Copilot in Azure becomes more effective and yields better results based on the quality of your inquiries, or prompts. In this blog we’re going to explore the value of incorporating Copilot in Azure in your Microsoft Cost Management tasks, and give some scenarios in which asking specific, fine-tuned prompts can yields the most helpful results.

Foster cross-departmental collaboration with Copilot in Azure

Copilot in Azure acts as a bridge between development teams and financial advisors, fostering a culture of cost awareness and optimization within organizations using Microsoft Azure cloud services. Let’s take an in-depth look at how Copilot in Azure becomes an intelligent assistant for helping both groups navigate and understand cloud spending.

Developers:

• Cost awareness from the start: With real-time insights into the cost implications of their code choices and resource utilization, developers can make informed decisions about resource allocation and optimization techniques.
• Proactive anomaly detection: Copilot in Azure leverages AI to identify unusual spikes in resource consumption or unexpected cost increases, triggering investigations into potential resource leaks or inefficient queries.
• Budget Management and Forecasting: Developers can stay within budget by getting insights into projected costs based on current usage patterns.

Financial advisors:

• Effortless cost visibility: Copilot simplifies cost analysis for financial advisors, allowing them to drill down into specific services or resource groups using natural language queries.
• Cost optimization recommendations: Copilot analyzes spending patterns and recommends potential cost-saving strategies, such as exploring different storage tiers or enabling automatic deletion of inactive data.
• Improved communication with developers: Empowered with clear and actionable insights, financial advisors can communicate cost considerations to developers more effectively.

Overall, Copilot in Azure adds significant value by providing detailed prompts, insights, and recommendations to optimize cloud spending and maximize ROI. Next let’s drill down into examples of specific scenarios where tailoring your Copilot in Azure prompts can yield the best results in Microsoft Cost Management.

Analyzing your costs

When using the Copilot in Azure integration in Microsoft Cost Management for optimized cost analysis, you should enter prompts that provide context specific to your business needs and the exact insights you’re seeking. These prompts should be tailored to help you gain insights into spending patterns, identify anomalies, and explore opportunities for cost optimization. For example:

• "Summarize costs for resource group AI development (aidev) over the last 6 months."
• "Can you provide an estimate of our expected aidev expenses for the next 6 months?"
• “Can you show our last month’s cost for tag ponumber : may2024?”
• "Show me the resource group with the highest spending in the last 6 months."
• “How much did we spend on virtual machines last month?”

You can modify these prompts based on your real-life scenarios or try additional prompts to meet your specific needs. The AI will provide you with information and recommendations based on the context of your Microsoft Cost Management data.

Understand anomalies in your cost

To understand anomalies in your costs, enter prompts that will guide Copilot in Azure to analyze your cost data, detect any irregularities, and provide explanations or insights into what might be causing these anomalies. For example:

• “Identify any unusual cost spikes this month.”
• “Explain the reason behind the unexpected increase in costs on Oct. 12th.”
• “Compare this month’s spending to the last month and highlight any anomalies.”
• “Show me a trend analysis of my cloud spend over the past year.”
• “What caused the recent surge in Azure costs?”
• "Why did my aidev cost spike on July 8th?"

These prompts provide a way to keep track of your spending and quickly address any issues that arise. Remember, the more specific your prompt, the more targeted the insights you’ll receive from Copilot in Azure.

Understand your commitment usage

To understand your commitment usage in Microsoft Cost Management, craft prompts that will guide Copilot in Azure to present detailed information about your commitments, such as reserved instances or committed spend, and offer insights into how effectively these commitments are being used. Copilot can also suggest ways to optimize your commitment usage to ensure you’re getting the most value out of your investment.

• “Show me a breakdown of my savings plan usage for the past quarter.”
• “How much of our reserved instances have we utilized this month?”
• “Can you show the utilization of our reserved instances and savings plans?”
• “Identify underutilized savings plans.”
• "Which resources are covered by Azure savings plans?"

Find cost savings recommendations

To find cost savings recommendations in Microsoft Cost Management, enter prompts that will guide Copilot in Azure to analyze your spending patterns, suggest actionable recommendations, and help you make informed decisions to optimize your cloud investments.

• “Provide a list of cost-saving measures for my cloud services.”
• “What are the top recommendations for cost optimization in my current setup?”
• “Show me options for reserved instance purchases that could save costs.”
• “Help me optimize my spending on cloud storage solutions.”

Reconcile your bills

To help you gain a clear understanding of your costs, identify any unexpected charges, and ensure that your billing records are accurate and up to date, provide Copilot in Azure with prompts that will help you break down and understand your billing information in detail. Copilot in Azure can provide you with a detailed analysis of your bills, making it easier to manage your cloud spend effectively.

• “Break down my latest bill by service.”
• “Summarize my invoice for May 2024.”
• “Compare my May 2024 with previous invoice.”
• “Show statement of account for April 2024.”
• “Reconcile my invoices and credit notes for Jan 2024.”
• “Compare my current bill to the previous month’s bill.”

Remember to tailor these prompts to your specific billing scenarios for more precise insights.

Start making better-informed financial decisions today with Copilot in Azure

By harnessing the power of AI in your cloud cost optimization strategy with Copilot in Azure, you’ll get intelligent insights and recommendations to identify savings opportunities, optimize resource utilization, and make informed financial decisions. With Copilot in Azure as your virtual assistant, you can streamline cost management, reduce manual effort, and gain a deeper understanding of your cloud spending patterns.

Get started today by visiting the Microsoft Cost Management website or contacting your Microsoft representative.

Just as Copilot weaves AI capabilities into your cloud strategy, FinOps best practices can also be critical for managing and forecasting your budget. FinOps is a cultural shift that empowers businesses to maximize the value of their cloud investments by fostering collaboration between finance, IT, and business teams. For more on how this pivotal financial framework can provide greater insight into your cloud spending, check out our new blog about bringing FinOps best practices into the era of AI.