The activity of monitoring, measuring, and regulating cloud costs is referred to as cloud cost management. The goal of cloud cost management is to guarantee that your investment in cloud providers like Amazon Web Services is maximized. The terms “cloud cost management” and “cloud cost optimization” are practically interchangeable, and we strongly suggest that you make full use of the cost management tools that are offered by Microsoft Azure.
Here is our list of the best Azure Cloud Management tools:
- Azure Cost Management + Billing This tool is most helpful for finance teams because it provides them with a comprehensive overview of their costs as well as chances to save money across their whole cloud infrastructure.
- Serverless360 It is a monitoring and management platform for serverless applications in Azure. It can monitor your serverless integration solutions in their entirety.
- nOps Azure Cost Optimization nOps is an event-driven cloud data platform that operates in real-time. nOps enables businesses to automate the reduction and prevention of recurrence of costs, as well as governance and compliance issues
- Spot by NetApp Spot offers usage reports and insights into cloud spending. You may maximize the efficiency of your cloud expenditure by putting the advice for cost management into action.
- Apptio’s Cloudability A financial management solution that includes tools for rightsizing, budgeting, and forecasting, in addition to monitoring, reporting, and evaluating the costs associated with cloud computing.
- CloudHealth by VMware Your entire financial health can be more easily understood with the use of CloudHealth’s Cost Summary dashboard.
When you create an Azure account, you will have access to a significant number of these services at no additional cost. Any company or organization that is thinking about moving to the Azure cloud or is already using it has to have financial controls in place for their Azure subscription.
On the other hand, as businesses progress toward the adoption of next-generation cloud services, cloud cost management is increasingly concentrating on the optimization of architectural components. When seen through this lens, application development may be done so that the underlying infrastructure is very elastic. This allows your firm to only pay for the resources that it and its customers utilize.
In this post, we will discuss tools to manage, oversee, and exercise control over the costs associated with using Microsoft Azure.
The Best Azure Cloud Management Tools
1. Azure Cost Management + Billing
Each of the public cloud providers comes with its built-in interface that gives you an overview of the charges associated with your account. Microsoft Azure is equipped with a built-in solution called Azure Cost Management + Billing that will assist you in better comprehending the costs associated with using the Azure cloud. Teams can obtain a bird’s eye perspective of how much they are spending on Azure’s cloud services, and with some clever connectors, they can do much more.
Key Features
- Works best on a limited scale, where there are few teams involved and a relatively straightforward cost structure.
- Integration between PowerBI and Amazon Web Services (through Cloudyn) makes it possible to create superior dashboards and reports.
- Gives you suggestions on how you might cut costs based on the way you use the service.
- Enables you to create notifications for your budgetary needs
- There is no additional fee for customers of Azure
Azure, much like other major cloud platforms, includes built-in features that can assist you in managing your cloud spending most efficiently. Utilization patterns are analyzed with advanced analytics, which results in rising expenses for Microsoft Azure customers. Azure Cost Management will also provide you with recommendations that will assist you in reducing costs.
You also can define particular budgets, and Azure will notify you whenever you go over a budget that you have set. Users of Azure can also configure notifications that will warn them whenever they use up all of the resources that they have been granted. Azure has built-in cost management features that are completely free for all customers of the platform.
Azure Cost Management offers comprehensive analytics that displays the cost and uses patterns of your organization as they evolve. The report on cost management provides an overview of the usage-based costs that Azure services and third-party marketplace items incurred. The cost that is displayed is the actual pricing that is associated with your Azure account.
This pricing is calculated using negotiated discounts, and it also takes into consideration discounts for resource reservations and Azure Hybrid Benefits. It is important to keep in mind, however, that additional fees, such as support costs and taxes, are not reflected in the reports.
2. Serverless360
Serverless360 is a monitoring and management platform for serverless applications in Azure. It can monitor your serverless integration solutions in their entirety. Although Azure Portal was developed specifically for use in vertical technology silos, real-world scenarios typically entail integrated cloud applications that make use of a minimum of three to four distinct Azure services. Because they are not usually constructed using a single technology stack, it can be challenging to visualize and manage connected solutions using Azure Portal.
Key Features:
- A complete picture of your Azure ecosystem in its entirety
- Code-free management of various Azure services together with enhanced security
- Centralized monitoring for Azure’s many different service locations
- A comprehensive collection of cutting-edge tools to meet the requirements of day-to-day business
- Eliminate the need for human involvement by fully automating labor-intensive processes
- Message tracking from beginning to end across all Integrations
- Documentation for Azure may be generated automatically in a matter of minutes.
- Conduct audits of actions taken by users on entities contained within Serverless360
Serverless360 is a tool that will assist you in managing and monitoring all of the dispersed Azure services that you have in a centralized location. Serverless360 can provide solutions to the problems that businesses experience when working with the Azure portal and resources. These problems include a lack of application visibility, integrated tooling, consolidated monitoring, message processing, auditing, application-level security, and more. Serverless360 can solve these problems and more.
Consolidated monitoring is functionality that may be obtained with Serverless360. It comes equipped with a Status Monitor, a Data Monitor, a Threshold Monitor, and a Watch Monitor. 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, then this scenario applies. If you want to communicate the status report with the members of the team using Slack, then the solution of Status Monitor is what you need. Serverless360 provides it.
3. nOps Azure Cost Optimization
You may have seen a jump in prices or an increase in costs, and you may have sought to determine why this occurred. In the following use case, we will study a three-month growth in the spend rate for AWS services in an AWS account. This growth will be measured using a metric that nOps refers to as the 3MRC (three-month recurring cost). After determining the origin of the cost rise, the next step is to correlate the changes with CloudTrail to locate the primary reason for the increase in costs.
Key Features
- Get a good look at the Azure platform’s underlying architecture.
- Maintain consistent application of the findings from cost-management analyses
- Automate Azure’s administrative tasks and ensure compliance
nOps is an event-driven cloud data platform that operates in real-time. nOps enables businesses to automate the reduction and prevention of recurrence of costs, as well as governance and compliance issues. Through a GraphQL endpoint, your team will have access to normalized cloud data, allowing them to automate mundane operations without having to deal with the hassle of managing cloud data architecture.
Automating a company’s reserved instances, tuning Lambdas after their deployments, sizing resources appropriately, and automating innumerable manual activities are simple for companies to do with AWS. nOps is a market-leading provider of cloud platform management services and has outstanding Azure capabilities. nOps is a tool that customers of Azure can use to do a variety of cost management tasks, such as tracking costs and identifying abnormalities. All cost management features are under one Cloud Cost-Control Dashboard.
The Azure Well-Architected framework is one example of an industry-leading standard that users can leverage to optimize cloud costs. For instance, you can locate prioritized insights and the essential cost management actions you need to take under the pillar labeled “cost optimization.”
You can obtain constant insights on the health of your AWS and Azure infrastructure to optimize costs, improve security, maintain reliability, maximize performance efficiency, and achieve operational excellence. When you execute a Well-Architected Review on your AWS and Azure workloads, you will not only save time but also obtain better insights. Because AWS and Azure Well-Architected alignment should be evaluated continually (best practices are not one-and-done), nOps offers you continuous feedback on your compliance with these standards.
4. Spot by NetApp
Spot is a modern cloud cost management tool that focuses more precisely on assisting businesses in automating their cloud cost improvements based on data. It does this by collecting and analyzing cloud usage data. This differs from other conventional tools in that it identifies opportunities, but it leaves the implementation of those chances up to the teams that are utilizing the tool. This distinction makes Spot a cloud management platform as well. This tool is most helpful for engineering teams; however, it also has some application in financial management.
Key Features
- Offers automation features to optimize cloud infrastructure, including the configuration of container environments
- Provides cost visibility across several cloud platforms, including AWS, GCP, and Azure
- Gives optimization recommendations that are easy to implement and can be done so in a few steps.
- Cost patterns for surfaces that do not seem to make sense based on usage patterns
- Provides an estimate of future costs by analyzing past consumption information
Utilizing the cloud’s Spot resources is one of the most effective ways to cut cloud service expenses. The term “spot” refers to unused compute resources that are hosted in the cloud. Spot capacity is available to anyone who needs it for temporary or unpredictable workloads. With Elastigroup, you might reduce your expenses by as much as 89 percent with the assistance of Spot by NetApp. Elastigroup is a tool that helps streamline the process of allocating unused computing resources.
Users can visit numerous Spot virtual machines within the same group if they choose to do so. You’ll be able to reduce expenses while maintaining the optimal capacity if you do it in this manner. In addition to that, Spot offers usage reports and insights into cloud spending. You may maximize the efficiency of your cloud expenditure by putting the advice for cost management into action.
5. Apptio Cloudability
Cloudability is a cloud cost management platform that focuses on assisting customers in gaining visibility into their spending, as well as managing and optimizing that spending once it has been uncovered. In addition to this, they assist businesses in visualizing the changes that will occur to their cost profile as a result of moving to the cloud. FinOps and financial teams will find the greatest value in using this application.
Key Features
- Provides cost visibility across several cloud platforms, including AWS, GCP, and Azure
- Recommendations for cost savings across all business workloads, including purchasing reserved instances and rightsizing
- Included in the package is a tag explorer, which can locate missing tags across the infrastructure.
- Equipped with capabilities for anomaly identification, budgeting, and forecasting that assist organizations in avoiding or preventing surprises in their cloud spending
You may also use it to schedule reserved instances, monitor container charges, locate abnormalities and set alarms, and discover chances for cost savings. In addition, you can use it to uncover cost-saving opportunities. In addition, Cloudability connects with cloud monitoring solutions such as PageDuty and DataDog and gathers data from such tools to provide additional in-depth insights on cloud costs.
People are using more cloud services as cloud computing becomes more widely adopted. Azure provides a conducive atmosphere for growth; nevertheless, with expansion comes the possibility of increased expenditures, and the management of those costs becomes increasingly more difficult as a firm expands. Users of Azure can get assistance from Apptio in allocating the appropriate tags to each cost center. You won’t have any trouble understanding the report if you do it in this manner. In addition to this, you can share billing reports with other members of the team so that every department is aware of how invoices change over time. Apptio provides advice on properly rightsizing Azure resources, which is of the utmost importance.
6. CloudHealth by VMware
Cloudhealth is a cost management application for the cloud that focuses specifically on governance within cloud charges. Customers can acquire visibility into their spending, optimize it, and set rules that match their compliance and financial management demands with the assistance of Cloudhealth, which was the first major tool of its sort to be released onto the market.
Key Features
- Features that support good governance, allowing for the creation and management of financial controls
- Able to establish a correlation between cloud installations and security threats
- Allows for cost awareness across several clouds and hybrid clouds
- Recommendations for cost savings across all business workloads, including purchasing reserved instances and rightsizing
- Includes tools for budgeting and forecasting that keep teams from going over their allotted spending.
CloudHealth provides users of Azure with automated tools that help them reduce their cloud expenditures. You can set individualized rules that will automate the management of your cloud spending. In addition to this, it offers a comprehensive cost analysis of cloud services in comparison to predetermined spending limits. In addition, the CloudHealth dashboard makes it simple for users to identify any unusual occurrences.
Use CloudHealth reports to get the advice of industry professionals on how to reduce wasteful spending on cloud services. A further method for optimizing cloud spending is providing the ability for subscribers to assign chargebacks to the appropriate business units. Your entire financial health can be more easily understood with the use of CloudHealth’s Cost Summary dashboard.
Best Management Tool – Top Choice
Serverless360 is our top choice for the best azure management tools. With this, you can make Azure administration, monitoring, tracing, remediation, and governance significantly more efficient by utilizing capabilities such as Business Applications, Business Activity Monitoring, Azure Documenter, and Cerebrata. These features are all available to you.
Serverless360 gives the Azure teams the ability to not only identify difficult technical problems but also to solve those problems by employing the most comprehensive toolkit available. In this method, you will be able to allow the specialists to spend as little time as possible debugging challenges, freeing them up to concentrate on developing innovative approaches for your company.
