Understanding Cloud Cost Fluctuations with Power BI
Staying on top of your cloud costs requires regular reviews. There are many ways to slice and dice your cloud costs; one approach I find helpful is comparing daily and monthly cost deltas. Below is a visual from my Power BI report showing how my previous month’s costs compare to the month prior. The visual is filtered to only show delta increases/decreases over $1K. I can quickly see we spent $5K more on Azure SQL Database in the selected month compared to the previous month. I call this my 'large cost swings' graph. I understand that everything is not linear, nor do things translate nicely from one day or month to the next. However, the data has a story to tell. What I ask my team to focus on is the story the data is telling. In this case, we made some modifications to ADF and SQL, leading to a $4K net reduction in costs. Some stories explain the outcome of one or more actions. Then there are those stories which can help shape your future consumption and spending.NEW: Set reservation to automatically renew
You can now opt in for your reservation to automatically renew. Your reservations will then automatically purchase a replacement when an existing reservation expires. Automatic renewal provides an easy way to continue getting reservation discounts. It also saves you from having to closely monitor a reservation's expiration or miss savings benefits until you manually renew. The renewal setting is turned off by default, but you can enable or disable the renewal setting anytime, up to the expiration of the existing reservation. Learn more here: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/cost-management-billing/reservations/reservation-renew?WT.mc_id=modinfra-117912-socuff
