Azure Cost Management

Learning how to budget and optimise in Microsoft Azure 

Introduction

With the world starting to use Azure services prominently, the flexibility to scale up and down has been an advantage. However, working without limits and a proper cost estimation leads to additional expenditures affecting the profitability of the organization.

Hence resulting into cost management as an essential skill that organizations need to leverage.

What is Azure Cost Management?

To leverage the costs spent, Azure offers the Cost Management service which provides insight into expenditures and cost utilization performed by the organization across the various Azure services and marketplace products.

The access to this service is free for customers and offers insight reports on the ongoing utilization, cost, data and other services in use by the organization.

The service also helps to understand the cost and expenditures and provides suggestions on cost-cutting methods.

Essential Features an of Azure Cost Management

1. Azure Cost Management is available to organizations 24x7 with uninterrupted insights on financial activities.
2. Users can easily create customized filters with cost management APIs to gain personalized insights into their internal systems.
3. Programming based opportunities are provided by to help organization gain information about their usage data.
4. When integrated with Azure Advisor, recommendations for enhancing the cost optimization are also available to the organization.

 Benefits of Azure Cost Management

1. Helps working on costs of Azure services – The cost management service allows users to predict and analyse expenditures, which helps in taking decisions for savings and optimization.
2. Breaks down cost among different departments- The cost management services allows to keep track of the expenditures made by the different departments with the help of resource groups, tags and management groups.
3. Provides insights- Insights of expected expenditure on Azure, difference between expected and actual expenditures and useless or additional expenditures among others are provided by Azure cost management services.

How to manage costs

Organizations alongside using Cost Management can also make sure they follow other methods.

1. Setting budgets and allocating spending- Budgets should be set accordingly and allocated to the teams and projects using Azure Cost Management.
2. Using Azure price calculator- Azure pricing calculator helps in estimating costs for new Azure projects.
3. Integrating billing and cost data- Organizations can also integrate their billing and cost data with their own reporting system
4. Remove unused sources-Identifying and removing unused sources such as VMS, unused databases and redundant storage accounts also helps in cost optimization.

How to optimize Azure costs with Azure Cost Management

1. Cost Analysis Report –Cost Analysis Report by the Azure Cost Management allows the user to analyse the organizations costs in details, segmenting costs using the resource tributes by Azure.
2. Azure Budgets- The Budget function helps the organization set a budget based on cost or usage. Organizations can revisit their budgets on a regular basis to see if specific budgets.
3. Azure Advisor- Advisor helps to identify opportunities for cost savings in Azure including underutilized virtual machines, purchasing reserved instances, removing unused network resources and optimizing database use.

Azure Cost Management Cost Analysis

Azure Cost Analysis (ACC) is a feature by Azure and a part of the Cost Management tool helps the organization or user to monitor, allocate and optimize cost of Azure resources.

The service provides an in-depth analysis of Azure spending and an easy breakdown of the Azure resources usage and cost. Additionally, Cost Analysis is not just a static report but an interactive tool allowing the organization to breakdown the data and explore from different angles and perspectives.

Azure Cost Analysis includes cot analysis charts, cost filters and cost alerts, allowing to understand the spending patterns and finding opportunities for cost savings.

Benefits of Azure Cost Analysis

1. Financial Transparency-The best part of ACC is that the user can see where the spendings are and helps gain a deeper understanding of Azure cost structure and make better informed decisions.
2. Informed resource allocation­- Detailed insights into Azure usage and costs helps allocate resources more effectively and identify the underutilized resources making it easier to understand on where the reallocation needs to be done.
3. Improved budgeting and forecasting- Budgeting and forecasting becomes better with ACC. Accurate and up-to-date information on the Azure costs stays with the organization making it simpler to make the IT budget.

Azure Advisor

Azure advisor is a digital cloud assistant allowing organization or a user to follow the best practices to optimize Azure deployments. It helps analyse your resource configuration and usage telemetry to recommend solutions that help improve cost effectiveness, performance, reliability, and security of Azure resources.

Advisor helps the organization or user to-

1- Get proactive, actionable and personalized best practices and recommendations.

2- Get recommendations with proposed actions inline.

Advisor can be accessed through the Azure portal.

Recommendations given by Azure are divided in 5 categories, which are

1-Reliability

2­-Security

3-Performance

4-Cost

5- Operational Excellence

Filters can be applied on Advisor to display recommendations for specific subscriptions and resource types.

Azure Pricing Calculator

The Azure Pricing calculator helps understand the moving workloads to Azure Cloud. Azure pricing is estimated once all data and applications are on Azure. Different pricing categories for different configurations and sizes of Azure virtual machines (AVM), accounting for memory, CPU, location, storage and hours of usage are made available.

The pricing calculator provides an estimation of a complete situation using a combination of the Azure services. Organizations cam then make an informed decision when considering a shift to the Azure cloud or expanding their presence in Azure.

The pricing calculator also provides a Total Cost of Ownership calculator, which helps define workloads, set assumptions and generate economic analysis of the total cost of Azure deployment in different situations.

Conclusion  

Azure services are widely used by numerous organizations. The cost analysis of the services and monitoring and optimizing them are the most significant part of a business. Gaining insights into the costing helps an organization decide implement cost effective methods to make sure the organization functions well and delivers quality results which help benefit the company.