A critical area of concern for organizations migrating to the cloud is cost. While cloud services have many benefits regarding management, features, and capabilities, without proper cost management, the spend can skyrocket. For the AZ-104 exam and as a Microsoft Azure Administrator, it’s crucial to grasp how cost management tools help identify and implement cost-saving opportunities. Let’s look at how we can manage costs effectively and the tools available, including Azure Cost Management.
We will look at budget alerts and monitor spending trends for managing cloud costs.
The Role of Azure Resources in Cost Management
Microsoft Azure and other SaaS solutions have unique pricing models. Understanding how services like Linux Virtual Machines, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Files, Azure Cosmos DB, and Microsoft 365 contribute to your overall costs is essential.
Azure tools provided to manage costs
Microsoft has included some fully-featured tools to help give visibility to Azure costs and tools to help identify cost saving opportunities. These tools include:
- Cost analysis
- Scheduled reports
- Budgets
- Cost alerts
Cost analysis
Gaining control and optimizing your Azure costs starts with identifying resources and the expenses tied to them.
Achieving complete visibility, mainly through effective tagging, is essential for clearly understanding your spending habits and implementing effective cost-control measures.
One of the tools in the Azure portal is the cost analysis tool. With the Cost Analysis tool in Azure, you get a detailed view of exactly which resources are being billed.
The Cost Analysis tool provides insights and cost trends into your current spending in Azure and historical costs. One of the tool’s powerful features is, it can also forecast future expenditures for the month ahead.
When you launch the Cost Analysis tool, you can choose from a number of different views by default:
- Resources
- Resource groups
- Daily costs
- Analyze with charts
- Browse all views
After clicking the resources view, the Cost Analysis tool shows all the resources and the individual costs associated with the resources.
You can download the data contained in the Cost Analysis:
Scheduled reports
You can also schedule reports in the form of scheduled exports.
Budgets
The budgets construct in the Cost Analysis tool is a way to define a budget to manage expenditures on resources. Budgets are a great way to prevent unexpected costs associated with resources.
With the budgets tool you can add and complete the relevant fields and select a scope for the budget. In other words, what resources are the budget assigned to? You can also trigger alerts based on what percentage of the budget is used.
Once you decide the threshold for the budget, you can trigger an action group for notifications. These can be SMS messages, Azure functions, or email alerts.
The budgets can be attached to specific action groups which you can configure to attach to actual Azure resource groups.
Below you can see the notifications that can be configured for the budgets.
You can attach various actions to the action group such as:
- Automation runbook
- Azure Function
- Event Hub
- ITSM
- Logic App
- Secure Webhook
- Webhook
Cost alerts
Cost alerts is another tool used by Azure administrators. With cost alerts, you can enable notifications for configured alert thresholds. These can be configured for individual resources or resource groups when these exceed a spending threshold.
Other useful tools to control spending
There are other useful tools to control spending other than the Cost Analysis tool with the budgets, exports, and alerting. Note the following:
- Azure Advisor
- Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that helps you follow best practices to optimize your Azure deployments. Utilizing Azure Advisor for cost optimization analyzes your resource configuration and usage telemetry, then provides recommendations to improve the cost-effectiveness, performance, high availability, and security of your Azure resources. Azure Advisor’s recommendations are categorized into five key areas: reliability, security, performance, cost, and operational excellence.
- Azure Pricing Calculator
- The Azure Pricing Calculator is a tool provided by Microsoft to help users estimate the cost of Azure products and services. It allows customers to select and customize Azure resources to meet their needs and receive detailed cost estimates. The tool includes pricing information for many Azure services, including compute, storage, and networking options, and can be used to simulate various usage scenarios and understand the potential cost implications.
- Azure Policy
- Azure Policy is a service that helps you enforce organizational standards and assess compliance at scale. It includes policies related to cost management, such as ensuring certain types or sizes of resources are not provisioned to avoid unnecessary costs.
- Azure Reservations
- Azure Reservations allows you to reserve resources in advance for one or three years. By committing to resources for a longer period, you can achieve significant cost savings compared to pay-as-you-go pricing. This includes the cost benefits of different types of VMs, such as reserved instances or choosing the appropriate operating system and storage options for maximizing virtual machine utilization.
Wrapping up
Microsoft offers many different tools to control and manage spending in the Azure cloud. The tools we have covered here provide the core functionality. Administrators and budget managers need to understand the cost of resources and utilize resources more efficiently. Make sure to understand the Cost Analysis tools, alerting, reporting, and other tools like reservations, Azure Monitor, reservations, etc, for the AZ-104 exam.
Related Posts:
Microsoft Azure Administrator: AZ-104 : Managing Azure Subscriptions – Part 17
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