The popularity of cloud computing is growing at a rapid rate, and more and more businesses are moving more and more of their workloads onto the cloud. As a result, appropriate management, optimization, and measurement are becoming increasingly important for controlling cloud expenditures.
In this article, we will discuss a wide variety of approaches and strategies that you can employ to assist customers in better managing their Azure costs and saving money.
What exactly is meant by “Azure Cost Management”?
Customers of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform get access to a cost management tool called Azure Cost Management through the Azure portal at no additional cost. It gives information about your overall costs and utilization across all of Azure’s services as well as the products available on Azure Marketplace. The service gives insights and reports, and it also has the capability of providing data regarding the use of other cloud providers by your firm.
After being enabled, Azure Cost Management will continue to keep a close eye on your resources and will provide you with continuing reports. Integrating Azure Cost Management with Azure Advisor allows you to receive cost recommendations that are specific to your consumption and can save you money. Utilizing REST APIs and integrating them with Microsoft Power BI are two options that you have for further tailoring your expense management.
1. Azure Price Calculator
Let’s check out the Azure Price Calculator and see what it has to offer. You choose the Azure service or resource you’re interested in, specify the details and settings, and the calculator will give you a breakdown of the pricing for the service based on several different parameters. As its name suggests, this is a calculator for calculating the cost of Azure services.
Before we begin the project, we can get an up-front estimate of how much our possible Azure package would cost thanks to the calculator, which enables us to get a pricing estimate for the items that we want to use within our solution and provides us with that estimate.
As a side note, take a look at Azure Migrate if you’re currently using on-premises software but wish to migrate this into Azure in the future. Azure Migrate is a service that analyzes the workloads that are currently being performed in your organization’s on-premises data centers. This tool gives you an idea of what you might require from a solution that can replace Azure. To begin, Azure Migrate examines the computers you already have on-premises to evaluate whether or not the migration is possible. After that, it makes suggestions for optimizing performance in Azure by adjusting the size of VMs. At long last, it generates a cost estimate for a solution that is built on Azure.
2. Cost Analysis Report
Through the use of Azure resource attributes and the Cost Analysis report found in Azure Cost Management, you can conduct an in-depth analysis of the costs associated with your firm.
With the help of the cost analysis report, you may provide answers to the following sorts of questions:
- Determine how much money has already been spent and whether or not the various cost entities are staying within their allotted budgets.
- Ensure that expenses are appropriate for typical use and do not exceed a reasonable range by investigating any unusually high usage of services or cost spikes.
- Compare the amount owed for Azure services to the amount of actual consumption, and make sure that the amount billed is what you anticipated. Check to see if there have been any notable shifts from the preceding months, and examine them if there have been.
- Determine the appropriate method for allocating the cost of Azure to different corporate units, projects, or individual users.
3. Azure Cost Analysis
The Cost Analysis tool that’s included in Azure Cost Management helps you break down the specifics of your Azure spending. With this tool, you can get a more in-depth look into exactly what everything costs, as well as do a variety of different sorts of grouping and filtering across your resources. If you want to know what a service is presently costing you or if you’re attempting to find out why your bill is greater than you anticipated, this is the tool you should utilize.
Keep in mind that having insight over the money you spend on Azure is quite important and should be something that is at the forefront of your thoughts at all times. You can view your spending based on any of the following criteria by using the filters on the Cost Analysis dashboard:
- Scope (Management Groups, Subscription, or Resource Group)
- Time (filter by day, week, month, year, last quarter, and many more)
- Granularity (None, Accumulated, Daily, Monthly)
- Organize by (Resource Group, Resource Type, Tags, and many more)
You may also opt to view Cost by Resource, which will show you a graph of the most expensive resources so that you can immediately identify what is costing the most, or you can design your custom filter, which will offer you more control over the information that is displayed to you. You have the option of exporting the results to either CSV or Excel, and you can even schedule the production of reports at predetermined intervals.
I’ve made use of the Cost Analysis tool to investigate the expenditures of customers and determine where the majority of their Azure money is being spent. In addition to the cost recommendations that Azure Advisor provides (which we’ll discuss in more detail later on), the Cost Analysis tool can assist you or your clients in reducing costs while working within Azure.
4. Azure cost alerts
There are three distinct sorts of expense alerts available using Azure:
- Budget alerts
- Notifications concerning your credit
- Department spending quota alerts
Budget alerts
When your expenditure reaches or surpasses a certain amount, whether based on the consumption of resources or the overall cost, budget alerts will warn you of the situation. The Azure Portal or Azure Consumption APIs can be used to generate budgets for Azure Cost Management.
When any of the conditions for generating a budget alert are satisfied, the alert is generated automatically. The Azure Portal makes it possible to view all of the cost alerts that have been generated; anytime a new alert is issued, it is displayed in Cost Alerts, and an alert email is sent to recipients that have been designated.
Credit notifications
When your Azure credit monetary commitments are depleted, the credit alerts will warn you of this fact. Monetary commitments are only available to enterprises that have Enterprise Agreements, and credit notifications are produced automatically whenever you reach 90 percent and 100 percent of your Azure credit level, respectively.
Department spending quota alerts
The notifications for the department spending quota will tell you when the spending for the department reaches a predetermined threshold. In the Azure Enterprise Agreement portal, spending quotas are set up, and whenever a threshold is reached—for instance, 50 percent or 75 percent of the quota—an email is sent out to department owners, and a notification is displayed in cost alerts. This helps to ensure that spending stays within reasonable limits.
5. Azure Advisor
A service known as Azure Advisor is capable of locating potential cost-cutting opportunities on Azure, including the following:
- Virtual machines are not being exploited to their full potential, particularly in terms of CPU or network utilization. After that, you will have the option of either resizing or shutting down the virtual machines.
- Buying Reserved Instances (RIs) for virtual machines (VMs) that have been operating without interruption for an extended length of time.
- Eliminating underutilized network resources such as ExpressRoute circuits, public IPs, and virtual network gateways
Make the most out of your database by properly scaling your MariaDB, MySQL, or PostgreSQL instances.
6. Azure Budgets
The majority of enterprises will have some sort of financial plan, and Azure Cost Management will allow you to establish an Azure Budget that covers your whole Azure subscription (s). This gives you the ability to set up notifications whenever the amount you spend on Azure reaches a predetermined proportion of your total budget.
Azure budgets enable you to monitor your spending and provide a warning if you are likely to go over your allotted budget for a specific period. Using this application, you will be able to establish your budget, keep track of your spending, and evaluate your progress toward your goals.
To create a new budget within your Azure Subscription, you will need to give it a name, choose an amount, select a length period (month, quarter, year, etc.), as well as specify a start date and an end date.
The next step is to configure the notifications. During this stage of the process, you will have the opportunity to decide whether or not to create an alert that will notify you when you reach a certain percentage of your budget for the duration period that you selected. You will also be prompted to enter the email addresses to which you would like notifications to be sent when the alert is triggered.
You can define a budget for Azure services, based on either their cost or their consumption, through the Budgets tool found inside the Azure Cost Management. It is important to review budgets regularly to determine whether or not certain budgets have been depleted and to make adjustments as necessary.
In addition to that, Azure Budget enables you to establish automated triggers, which contributes to improved cloud control. In this way, for instance, you might design a service to terminate virtual machines (VMs) when particular budget thresholds are achieved, if the budget is over. You also can convert your infrastructure to different service levels in response to various budget events.
Azure Cost Management with Serverless360 Azure Cost Optimization Tool
This platform provides monitoring and administration capabilities for serverless apps hosted in Azure. Your serverless integration solutions can be monitored in their entirety with its help. Real-world scenarios often involve integrated cloud applications that make use of a minimum of three to four unique Azure services.
Even though Azure Portal was created primarily for usage in vertical technology silos, this is not the case in real-world settings. Because connected solutions are not typically built with a single technology stack in mind, it can be difficult to visualize and manage these types of applications when utilizing Azure Portal.
Serverless360 Azure Cost Optimization Tool is a solution that will aid you in administering and monitoring all of the distributed Azure services that you have in a centralized location. You may access this functionality from any computer with an internet connection. Serverless360 can give businesses solutions to the challenges they face when interacting with the Azure interface and resources. A lack of application visibility, integrated tooling, unified monitoring, message processing, auditing, application-level security, and other issues are among these concerns. Serverless360 can solve all of these issues and more.
Serverless360 offers the functionality of consolidated monitoring, which can be gained by using the software.
This scenario applies to you if your company’s business solution makes use of serverless components provided by Azure, such as Service Bus Queues, Logic Apps, and Function Apps; and if your monitoring requirements dictate that you receive an up-to-date status report on all of your resources at regular intervals of one hour each; and if your company’s business solution makes use of serverless components provided by Azure; and if your company’s monitoring requirements dictate that you receive an up-to-date status If you want to use Slack to communicate the status report to the other members of the team, then the solution that Status Monitor provides is what you require. It is made available by Serverless360.
