Azure Cost Management
Microsoft Cost Management is a suite of tools that help you manage, monitor, allocate, and optimize the cost of your Microsoft Cloud Azure for Student Subscription.
A few examples of what you can do in Cost Management and Billing include:
- Report on and analyze costs in the Azure portal.
- Monitor costs proactively with budget, anomaly, and scheduled alerts.
Plan with cost in mind
Before you deploy cloud resources, assess the following items:
- The Azure offer that best meets your needs
- The resources you plan to use
- How much they might cost
Azure provides tools to assist you in the assessment process. The tools can give you a good idea of the investment required to enable your workloads. Then you can select the best configuration for your situation.
Estimate the cost of your solution
Before you deploy any infrastructure, assess how much your solution will cost. The assessment will help you create a budget for your organization for the workload, up-front. Then you can use a budget over time to benchmark the validity of your initial estimation. And you can compare it with the actual cost of your deployed solution.
Azure pricing calculator
The Azure pricing calculator allows you to mix and match different combinations of Azure services to see an estimate of the costs. You can implement your solution using different ways in Azure - each might influence your overall spending. Thinking early about all of the infrastructure needs of your cloud deployment helps you use the tool most effectively. It can help you get a solid estimate of your estimated spending in Azure.
For more information, see the Azure pricing calculator.
Get Started with Azure Cost Management
Create budgets
After you've identified and analyzed your spending patterns, it's important to begin setting limits for yourself and your teams. Azure budgets give you the ability to set either a cost or usage-based budget with many thresholds and alerts. Make sure to review the budgets that you create regularly to see your budget burn-down progress and make changes as needed. Azure budgets also allow you to configure an automation trigger when a given budget threshold is reached. For example, you can configure your service to shut down VMs. Or you can move your infrastructure to a different pricing tier in response to a budget trigger.
For more information, see Azure Budgets.
For more information about budget-based automation, see Budget Based Automation.
Start Analysing Costs
If you have a new subscription, you can't immediately use Cost Management features. It might take up to 48 hours before you can use all Cost Management features.
Sign in to Azure
- Sign in to the Azure portal Cost Management.
Get started in Cost analysis
To review your costs in cost analysis, open the scope in the Azure portal and select Cost analysis in the menu. For example, go to Subscriptions, select a subscription from the list, and then select Cost analysis in the menu.
Use the Scope to switch to a different scope in cost analysis.
The scope you select is used throughout Cost Management to provide data consolidation and control access to cost information. When you use scopes, you don't multi-select them. Instead, you select a larger scope, which others roll up to, and then filter down to the nested scopes you need. This approach is important to understand because some people may not have access to a single parent scope, which covers multiple nested scopes.
The initial cost analysis view includes the following areas:
Currently selected view: Represents the predefined cost analysis view configuration. Each view includes date range, granularity, group by, and filter settings. The default view shows a running total of your costs for the current billing period with the Accumulated costs view, but you can select other built-in views from the menu. The view menu is between the scope pill and the date selector. For details about saved views, see Save and share customized views.
Filters: Allow you to limit the results to a subset of your total charges. Filters apply to all summarized totals and charts.
Cost: Shows the total usage and purchase costs for the selected period, as they're accrued and will show on your bill. Costs are shown in your billing currency by default. If you have charges in multiple currencies, cost will automatically be converted to USD.
Forecast: Shows the total forecasted costs the selected period.
Budget (if selected): Shows the current budget amount for the selected scope, if already defined.
Granularity: Indicates how to show data over time. Select Daily or Monthly to view costs broken down by day or month. Select Accumulated to view the running total for the period. Select None to view the total cost for the period, with no breakdown.
Pivot (donut) charts: Provide dynamic pivots, breaking down the total cost by a common set of standard properties. They show the largest to smallest costs for the current month.
Understand forecasting your Azure Spend
Based on your recent usage, cost forecasts show a projection of your estimated costs for the selected time period. If a budget is set up in Cost analysis, you can view when forecasted spend is likely to exceed budget threshold. The forecast model can predict future costs for up to a year. Select filters to view the granular forecasted cost for your selected dimension.
Select a cost view
Cost analysis has many built-in views, optimized for the most common goals:
| View | Answer questions like |
|---|---|
| Accumulated cost | How much have I spent so far this month? Will I stay within my budget? |
| Daily cost | Have there been any increases in the costs per day for the last 30 days? |
| Cost by service | How has my monthly usage vary over the past three invoices? |
| Cost by resource | Which resources cost the most so far this month? |
| Invoice details | What charges did I have on my last invoice? |
| Resources (preview) | Which resources cost the most so far this month? Are there any subscription cost anomalies? |
| Resource groups (preview) | Which resource groups cost the most so far this month? |
| Subscriptions (preview) | Which subscriptions the most so far this month? |
| Services (preview) | Which services cost the most so far this month? |
| Reservations (preview) | How much are reservations being used? Which resources are utilizing reservations? |
The Cost by resource and Resources views are only available for subscriptions and resource groups.
For more information about views, see:
- Use built-in views in Cost analysis
- Save and share customized views
- Customize views in cost analysis
View costs
Cost analysis shows accumulated costs by default. Accumulated costs include all costs for each day plus the previous days, for a constantly growing view of your daily aggregate costs. This view is optimized to show how you're trending against a budget for the selected time range.
Use the forecast chart view to identify potential budget breaches. When there's a potential budget breach, projected overspending is shown in red. An indicator symbol is also shown in the chart. Hovering over the symbol shows the estimated date of the budget breach.
There's also the daily view that shows costs for each day. The daily view doesn't show a growth trend. The view is designed to show irregularities as cost spikes or dips from day to day. If you've selected a budget, the daily view also shows an estimate of your daily budget.
When the forecast is disabled, you won't see projected spending for future dates. Also, when you look at costs for past time periods, cost forecast doesn't show costs.
Generally, you can expect to see data or notifications for consumed resources within 24 to 48 hours.
Creating your First Budget
Learn how to:
- Create a budget in the Azure portal
- Create and edit budgets with PowerShell
- Create a budget with an Azure Resource Manager template
Watch the Apply budgets to subscriptions using the Azure portal video to see how you can create budgets in Azure to monitor spending.
To watch other videos, visit the Cost Management YouTube channel.
Follow this Tutorial - Create and manage Azure budgets - Microsoft Cost Management | Microsoft Learn
Additional Resources
Cost Management + Billing - Microsoft Cost Management | Microsoft Learn
Control Azure spending and manage bills with Microsoft Cost Management and billing | Microsoft Learn