Analyzing your cloud spending is very important to ensure that you’re not overspending or mis managing Azure cloud resources. Azure cloud makes it easier to analyze and manage your resource costs by providing a single dashboard view of your spending.
On the Azure Cost Management + Billing page of Azure portal, you can find options that help you understand your Azure spending, billing, monitor and control Azure spending and optimize resource use.
To access Cost Management in Azure and search for Cost Management and select the Cost Management option. The selection will send you to Azure Cost Management page.
Azure Cost Management + Billing is broken down into three following categories.
Setup your account option lets you view and setup account and subscription configurations.
Click on Analyze costs button to go to the Cost Analysis page where you can analyze all your cloud resources costs,
The first chart on the page shows the monthly cost with actual cost, forecast, and budget. You can also filter costs by group, granularity, and area.
Granularity filter lets you filter data on daily and monthly.
Select Daily option in the list. The daily cost chart looks like this.
Below on the page, you can also see the cost breakdown for the month three charts based on service name, location, and resource group name.
You can change these filter options by clicking on the name and you will see more options in the filter. Set filter that you may want to see resources and costs
The default view of the charts is Accumulated costs. But you can click on the VIEW and you will see options to show data based on Cost by resource, Daily costs, Cost by service, and Invoice details.
The Daily costs view looks like the following where you can see also notice if you see any abnormal spike or drop in costs.
For example, Cost by resource view looks like a tabular form where you resource name and its monthly cost.
You can also drill down more into these specific resources by clicking on them and get more granular data about that resource or service.
You can also download this data into PNG, Excel, and CSV formats. Click on Download link at the top and you will see the following options to download and export dashboard data.
Azure also provides an Azure Cost Management API that provides the ability to consume Azure cost data into external applications. These APIs are currently available to Azure Enterprise customers. Learn more about Azure Consumption API here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/consumption/
In this article, we learned how we can use Azure Cost Management tool to analyze and monitor our Azure cloud costs.
When using a cloud such as Azure or AWS, it is very important to keep an eye on spending and know in advance. In my next article, let's learn how to set cost alerts to get notifications about our cloud spending so there will be no surprises.