Azure Cost Management

What is Azure cost management?

First, it is essential to understand how Azure cost works. The amount of storage, processing, and network resources a company provides is factored into Azure charges. In other words, you only must pay for what you use. For instance, a virtual machine (VM) with more excellent storage will cost more than one with less. Organizations may scale up or down as needed because Azure is a cloud platform. Azure cloud management refers to aligning the actual resource usage with the recommended usage.

What is the use of Azure cost management?

Azure cloud users can use Azure Cost Management for free through the Azure portal. It details your overall spending and usage for all Azure services and Azure Marketplace goods. The solution offers analysis and reporting and can also give information about how your company uses other cloud service providers. Once activated, Azure Cost Management keeps track of your resources constantly and generates reports. Azure Advisor and Azure Cost Management can be integrated to provide cost recommendations specific to your usage.

What are the benefits of Azure Cost Management?

Gaining visibility into cloud expenditures and assisting you in allocating money to departments or initiatives are two significant advantages that Azure cost management can provide for your business.

Using the idea of cost entities, Azure Cost Management divides your resources into many groups. An organization’s department or project that pays for Azure services is referred to as a cost entity. A cost model that organizes resources based on the tags that teams have assigned to the existing Azure resources can also be developed.

Organizations can use Azure Cost Management to view and explore costs related to their unique project budgets once they have correctly created cost entities and models. To prevent or limit misuse, you may create budgets and notifications for projects, teams, or specific individuals.

How to Monitor and Optimize Azure Costs?

Azure Cost Management enables you to forecast future costs and monitor past cloud usage and costs. You can monitor costs over a day, a month, or an entire year to spot trends and anomalies, locate chances for optimization, and make savings. This information was obtained straight from Azure, displaying the precise units used to calculate your Azure bill. Below are the multiple ways how you can optimize cost in Azure,

Cost Analysis Report: You can segment costs using Azure resource attributes to perform a detailed analysis of your organization’s costs using the Cost Analysis report in Azure Cost Management.

Azure Budgets: You can establish a budget for Azure services based on cost or consumption using the Budgets tool in Azure Cost Management. Budgets should be reviewed frequently to determine whether any budgets have expired and to adjust as necessary.

Azure Pricing Calculator: To compare prices for various Azure service combinations, the Azure Pricing Calculator is frequently used in conjunction with Azure Cost Management. This helps set up new workloads in Azure or substantially grow already-existing workloads.

Azure Advisor: Azure Advisor can find ways to save costs on Azure, such as underutilized virtual machines, buying reserved instances, deleting unused network resources, and improving database use.

Azure Cost Management best practices

Depending on the settings and services users select, the total cost of an Azure cloud computing bill varies. Nevertheless, there are some broad techniques to cut Azure costs. For instance, a business may use resource tags, native Azure cost management features, and several payment options.

Here are a few recommendations for best practices in Azure cost management, many of which may be used with any Azure resource type.

Discover the unused resources

Even though some resources may not be in use, a cloud services statement will include fees for all resources acquired. Costs associated with underutilized storage can be quickly decreased in such a situation. As a result, businesses must constantly check the cloud infrastructure to see which resources are still in use and which can be promptly shut off.

Rightsizing the VMs

In terms of VM storage and processing power, Azure has many possibilities. Businesses may evaluate infrastructure utilization and make adjustments based on daily requirements because it is a flexible infrastructure platform. Therefore, a surefire way to reduce Azure expenses is to monitor utilization and ensure the VM is downsized.

Select the appropriate payment method

Azure provides various payment methods –

Pay-as-you-go: Option gives you the most flexibility and highest cost and enables you to increase infrastructure as needed

Reserved instances: Azure Reserved instances can save up to 70% on costs and are best for long-term workloads. They demand a one- to three-year upfront commitment.

Spot instances: Spot instances enable Azure to use unused physical computing resources and save up to 90% on costs. Spot instances are appropriate for workloads that aren’t time-bound because they can be halted at any time.

Go Serverless

Another way to cut expenses is through serverless computing, which offers different services in Azure. You pay only when the software runs. Serverless computing is best suited for compute-intensive workloads that run intermittently.

Reducing Azure Costs with Turbo360

Turbo360’s Cost Analyzer is an all-in-one integrated solution that offers a variety of features to meet the user’s needs and requirements. Cost Analyser provides unparalleled visibility on spending with deep Azure cost analysis across Azure subscriptions, environments, and teams. Turbo360 provides an actionable Azure Cost estimation tool to maximize savings, optimize spending with better volume-based purchasing decisions, and eliminate waste. Below are the benefits you receive out of Turbo360,

Uncover cost optimization

Cost Optimization in Cost Analyzer enables you to create optimization schedules with resources associated by defining the tiers, throughput values, and the resource state concerning the Up and Down hours of a week. You can visualize the cost spent across multiple subscriptions in a single pane and start gauging cyclic cost trends and patterns with hyper customization.

Deep Azure cost analysis reports

Cost breakdown by subscription, region, tag, and resource groups level helps get a deeper analysis. Organizations can achieve team and account-level cost visibility and act immediately on any potential spikes in Azure cost.

Intelligent alerts for proactive response

Budget monitoring helps you to stick to your budgets by proactively monitoring Azure spending. Teams can also leverage the ready-to-use cost trend dashboards to forecast optimal budgets. The calendar view facilitates access to a historical summary of alert status, which spots the accurate date and time of the cost spike.

Azure Cost Analysis offers advantages, but it also has disadvantages. Azure only offers a single subscription level’s worth of features. Enterprise firms typically operate in various environments; therefore, this constraint does not benefit them. Visualizing many settings under one roof would be an advantageous alternative for such an enterprise user. Turbo360’s Cost Analyser eliminates all these challenges and provides a better option for cost monitoring and visualization across multiple Azure subscriptions.

Experience our Cost Analyser feature in the 15 days trial version