Key takeaways on Azure cost management

• Azure Cost Management is a set of tools and services provided by Microsoft that help businesses monitor, analyse, and optimise their cloud spending on the Azure platform.
• Key features of Azure Cost Management include real-time cost tracking, budgeting, alerts, and advanced analytics to identify spending trends and anomalies.
• Third-party cost management tools enhance Azure’s capabilities by providing additional insights, tracking, and optimisation opportunities for cloud financial management.

What is Azure Cost Management?

Azure Cost Management is a free service provided by Microsoft that helps organisations visualise and forecast their Azure costs.

It is designed to assist in finding underutilised resources, eliminating waste, and ultimately reducing costs. This suite of tools and services is essential for any company looking to effectively manage and optimise their cloud spending.

One of the standout features of Azure Cost Management is its seamless integration with various Azure components. This allows organisations to analyse past cloud usage and expenses, providing insights into overall costs, Azure service utilisation, and even other cloud provider usage.

Beyond analysing costs, Azure Cost Management lets users set budgets for their Azure activities. Establishing accountability within teams for cloud expenses enhances financial awareness and responsible spending.

Read more related articles about Azure:

• Azure cost reduction: how to save money on your cloud bill?
• The guide to Azure Governance: tools, security, and cost control

How does Azure Cost Management help businesses control cloud expenses?

Azure Cost Management helps businesses control cloud costs by providing real-time cost tracking, budgeting tools, cost analysis, and optimisation recommendations. It enables organisations to monitor spending patterns, set budgets with alerts, and identify cost anomalies in cloud infrastructure.

With Azure Cost Analysis, businesses can break down expenses by subscription, resource group, or service. The budgeting and alert system guarantees that teams stay within financial limits by notifying them of unexpected cost spikes.

Azure also integrates AI-driven cost optimisation recommendations through Azure Advisor, which suggests ways to optimise usage, such as reserved instances, auto-scaling, and right-sizing resources.

Additionally, multi-cloud support allows businesses to track AWS and Azure costs in a single dashboard, making it easier to manage overall cloud expenses.

Activating Azure Cost Management requires access to a billing account or subscription within the Azure portal.

If you’re looking for ways to save money in the cloud, check out also:

• Cloud cost optimisation: how to reduce your cloud expenses and maximise ROI?
• FinOps consulting: maximise your ROI with experts
• AWS cost reduction: a guide to lowering your cloud bill

What are the key features of Azure Cost Management?

Azure Cost Management boasts a range of advanced analytics capabilities that reveal spending trends and usage patterns over time:

• cost reporting,
• cost optimisation recommendations,
• multi-cloud cost tracking,
• tagging & cost allocation,
• Power BI integration
• or role-based access control (RBAC).

These analytics are crucial for spotting anomalies, understanding spending behaviors, and estimating future costs.

One of the standout features of Azure Cost Management is the ability to set budgets and cost alerts.

This feature allows users to monitor spending closely and prevent overages, ensuring that cloud costs remain within the allocated budget. Setting up alerts for specific spending thresholds can help companies take proactive measures to control their spendings.

Additionally, Azure Cost Management reflects actual pricing, including negotiated discounts, resource reservations, and hybrid benefits. This warrants that businesses have an accurate understanding of their cloud costs and can make better financial decisions based on precise data.

Benefits of Azure Cloud financial management

Azure Cost Management allows users to view costs based on various dimensions, aiding in identifying key cost drivers.

This level of visibility is essential for effective cost analysis and enhances financial control by providing insights into resource usage, environment deployments, and management ownership.

Frequent evaluations of cloud spend enable businesses to identify unnecessary costs, unused or idle resources. By conducting periodic FinOps assessments, businesses can take corrective actions.

Optimising Azure Cloud resources involves identifying untapped resources, leveraging reserved instances, right-sizing virtual machines, and reducing data transfer costs.

An overview of essential Azure Cost Management tools

Microsoft Cost Management is a suite of tools designed to help organisations analyse and optimise their cloud expenses.

The best Azure Cost Management tools collect, analyse, and manage Azure costs on an hourly or real-time basis. They cover fundamental processes like resource planning, budgeting, cost estimation, and tracking, making them indispensable for any organisation.

Azure Cost Analysis

The Cost Analysis tool in Azure Cost Management allows users to analyse their cloud spending effectively. Segmenting costs using Azure resource attributes gives organisations detailed insights into their expenses, aiding in understanding spending patterns and identifying cost-saving opportunities.

Tagging resources in Azure Cost Analysis allows to categorise expenses and link them to specific projects or departments for improved tracking.

Azure Budgets and Alerts

Azure Cost Management enables users to establish budgets for their Azure subscriptions. This asserts spending aligns with the organisation’s financial plans.

When creating a new budget, users need to provide details such as name, amount, time period, start, and end date. Budgets can be set based on cost or usage, providing flexibility in managing cloud expenses.

Revisiting budgets regularly is crucial to assure that they are still aligned with goals and that specific budgets have not run out. Azure Budgets also offer automated triggers when budget thresholds are reached, facilitating cloud governance and enabling teams to take corrective actions promptly.

Find out more about Cloud Governance:

• How to build and implement a cloud governance framework?
• The ultimate guide to Cloud Cost Governance for businesses
• Cloud Governance Services – work with Future Processing!

Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor is a personalised Microsoft Azure cloud advisor that provides recommendations for optimising Azure deployment. It identifies opportunities to reduce costs by analysing cloud usage and suggesting actions, such as resizing or shutting down unused resources.

Regularly checking recommendations in Azure Advisor can help organisations in cloud cost optimisation.

Azure Pricing Calculator

The Azure Pricing Calculator is designed to estimate the costs of Azure services. It allows users to simulate costs for different configurations, providing insights into potential expenditures based on selected details and settings.

This tool is particularly valuable when deploying new workloads or expanding existing ones, as it helps users assess the financial implications in advance.

Exploring different service configurations provides accurate cost estimates, helping organisations make informed decisions about their cloud platform investments.

Azure Hybrid Benefit

The benefits of Azure Hybrid Benefit allow organisations to use on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses within Azure. This can lead to significant cost savings, as it leverages existing licenses and reduces the need for additional expenditure on new licenses.

Third-Party cost management tools

There are several third-party cost management tools available for Azure, each offering unique features and benefits:

• Spot by NetApp provides access to spot instances for fault-sensitive workloads.
• CloudCheckr provides tools for Azure customers that enhance cloud visibility and optimise resource usage. Additionally, it includes features for security monitoring and compliance management.
• CloudHealth delivers custom policies, cost reporting by project or team, and anomaly alerts for Azure financial management.
• Flexera helps manage both hybrid cloud costs and Azure costs, providing insights for on-premises and SaaS deployments.
• Cloudability recommends Azure reserved instances to optimise spending and offers an enterprise-grade cloud cost management platform.

Tools like CloudZero, Densify, Looker, Kubecost, and GorillaStack offer additional capabilities such as granular cost information, advanced monitoring for container resource management, cost reports, and real-time notifications for potential issues.

How can Future Processing help businesses optimise Azure costs?

Listen to a conversation with Adam Gaca and Adam Grabek, as they explain how companies often lose money in the cloud due to inefficient management practices:

The potential for cost savings and efficiency achieved through Azure Cost Management is immense. By implementing best practices and utilising the available tools, businesses can achieve significant financial benefits and ensure that their cloud resources are used effectively.

Future Processing provides expert Azure FinOps consulting, helping organisations implement cost management best practices, cloud automation, and governance frameworks to maximise cloud efficiency and reduce waste.

Our team of cloud cost experts helps organisations gain full visibility into their cloud spending, eliminate unnecessary expenses, and maximise efficiency through proactive cost management. As a Microsoft Solutions Partner and having obtained the Microsoft Solution Partner in Azure and Infrastructure badge, we have cloud discounts for customers and incentives for migrations, upgrades, and new applications.

We start with a comprehensive cloud cost audit, identifying underutilised resources, inefficiencies, and potential savings opportunities. Our team helps businesses implement budget controls, cost allocation strategies, and recommendations.

We also provide guidance on reserved instances, savings plans, and auto-scaling configurations, allowing you to achieve long-term cost reductions while maintaining scalability.