One of the main features of the cloud is the ability to create new resources with ease and speed. At the same time an important and fundamental challenge is to be able to keep under control the expenses to be incurred for the resources created in the cloud. The tool Azure Cost Management makes it easy to find from which services are generated costs, prevent unnecessary costs and optimize resource costs. This article lists the characteristics of the solution and provides guidance in order to best use it for maximize and optimize investments in cloud resources.
Features of the solution
Azure Cost Management is enabled by default and accessible from Azure portal for all Microsoft Enterprise Agreement and Pay-As-You-Go subscriptions. The availability of the solution for CSP subscriptions (Cloud Solution Providers) is scheduled for the second half of the year. Azure Cost Management contemplates the Azure services, including reservations, and cost data by the use of third-party solutions coming from the Azure Marketplace. All costs shown are based on negotiated prices and the data is updated every four hours.
Azure Cost Management allows you to do the following regarding the cost of cloud resources.
Monitor the cloud costs
With this solution you can provide, to the various departments involved in the use of cloud resources, cost visibility of resources for which they are responsible. Furthermore, you have the option to go into detail and view the trend of costs with a very intuitive and interactive experience. From section Cost analysis you can view the costs, with a chance to put filters on time period and eventually group them according to different parameters.
Figure 1 – Cost analysis – costs accumulated in the last month
Setting for the selected period the daily granularity you can have a graph that shows precisely the day-by-day costs.
Figure 2 – Cost analysis – costs incurred daily
Azure Cost Management also offers the possibility to export the data to Excel or CSV, after setting the required view in section Cost analysis.
Figure 3 -Export the data view created in Cost analysis
The downloaded file contains details about the context used for file generation:
Figure 4 – Summary of Excel sheet created
This feature can be useful for detailed analysis that require a consolidation of this information with other data.
In case there is a need for more functionality in terms of integration and customization you can use Power BI connectors for the creation of specific dashboards and Azure Cost Management APIs to process information with other solutions.
Assignment of responsibility to the various project teams
To raise awareness of the various project teams by making adequate use of resources in terms of spending, you can define your budget. So you can get a significant cost optimization, with no impact in terms of agility in creating resources .
Figure 5 – Creating a budget
When creating a budget it is defined a spending for a certain period of time and you can set the alert to warn those directly responsible when it reaches a certain percentage of the preset threshold.
Optimization of costs
Although you may opt to manage the various Azure resource costs to team by giving them a budget, you can not always be assumed to know how to optimize resource efficiency and reduce costs. Azure Cost Management is able to provide specific recommendations to achieve cost savings.
Figure 6 – Advisor recommendations
In the specific case, to optimize Azure resource costs , it is recommended the purchase ofVirtual Machine Reserved Instances (VM RIs), estimating the annual savings that could be obtained by adopting VM RIs.
Azure Cost Management will soon be enriched with a new feature (currently in public preview) involving the management of costs incurred in the AWS, with the same characteristics as shown for Azure. This integration simplifies management of costs in multi-cloud scenarios.
The Cost of the Solution
You can use Azure Cost Management for free, in all its features, for the Azure environment. As for the management of AWS costs is expected, in the final release, a charge equal to 1% of total spend managed for AWS. For more details on the cost of the solution you can consult the pricing of Cost Management.
Conclusions
Azure Cost Management is a great tool that allows you to maintain complete visibility of costs and to drive you to have a better manage of the expenses in the cloud resources. Thanks to the flexibility of this tool, constantly evolving, you can get the most from the investment in the cloud easily and intuitively.
