Azure Cost Management: A Brief Overview

Are you looking to optimise your cloud spending? Azure Cost Management is the key to unlocking a streamlined budget for your cloud resources. Because of its robust analytics and reporting features, users can track resource usage and manage budgets with precision.

Azure Cost Management provides a comprehensive set of tools designed to monitor, allocate, and optimise expenses across Azure services. It empowers organisations to gain visibility into their cloud spending, identify trends, and make informed decisions to drive cost efficiency. Dive into this blog to learn how this strategy can transform your approach to cloud finances.

Table of Contents  

1) What is Azure Cost Management service, and how can it help?  

2) Best Azure Cost Management tools  

3) How to optimise costs in Azure Platform?  

4) What are the challenges of Azure Cost Management?  

5) Advantages of Microsoft Azure Cost Management 

6) Conclusion

What is Azure Cost Management service, and how can it help?  

Azure Cost Management is a service that is part of the billing experience. While subscribing to Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Computing platform. It is a report that organisations can use to analyse statistics like past usage of the Cloud and its cost. In addition, they can also use it to predict future expenses.

How can it help?  

Azure Cost Management helps organizations manage their billing account, purchases, and subscriptions in one place. Leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft Azure, this tool provides comprehensive oversight and control over cloud expenditures. Apart from this, they can also use this to monitor and control expenses and spending and optimise resource use. It also gives recommendations and suggestions to optimise their spending.

Best Azure Cost Management tools 

Managing costs efficiently in cloud computing environments is crucial for organisations looking to optimise their resources and budgets. With many tools available for Azure Cost Management, businesses have plenty of options to choose from based on their specific requirements and preferences. Let's delve into some of the top Azure Cost Management tools and explore their features, benefits, and use cases. 

Microsoft Cost Management – Native Tool 

Microsoft's native Cost Management tool, available on the Azure portal, offers organisations a comprehensive solution for managing Azure costs and billing. This tool provides insights into total usage costs across various Azure services and charges for Azure Marketplace products. Additionally, organisations can generate detailed reports to analyse cost data, enabling them to identify trends and predict future costs. The tool runs continuously, monitoring resources and activities without incurring additional costs, allowing organisations to optimise their cloud spending effectively. 

Cloudability

Cloudability is a versatile cost management tool that supports tracking costs across multiple Cloud Service Providers, including AWS and Azure. It provides features for presenting cost reports and analysing resources, making it useful for optimising Azure Reserved Instances purchases. 

CloudZero

CloudZero offers integration with various cloud providers like Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and AWS, allowing organisations to gather insights into their cloud spending. Its flexible integration framework enables quick integration with cloud providers and support for DevOps vendors such as New Relic and Datadog.  

CloudHealth 

CloudHealth is a comprehensive Azure Cost Management tool suitable for large organisations. It offers solutions aligned with the latest security compliance guidelines, allowing organisations to generate individual cost reports for teams, projects, and functions. Additionally, organisations can set alerts to notify them when certain services or functions are about to exceed their budget. 

Flexera

Flexera enables organisations to manage, view, and optimise cloud costs, including Software as a Service (SaaS) deployments. Although it requires manual tagging, Flexera offers features for estimating costs, setting up budgets, analysing cost data, and generating detailed cost reports. 

CloudCheckr

CloudCheckr offers cost management, cloud security, and cloud compliance solutions for organisations. It provides tools for cloud visibility, resource optimisation, and purchasing recommendations for buying reserved instances. Additionally, CloudCheckr facilitates VMware to AWS migration services. 

Virtana Optimise

Virtana Optimise assists organisations in optimising performance and costs across their cloud infrastructure. It identifies idle and underutilised resources, enabling organisations to avoid unnecessary spending and resource waste effectively. 

Harness

Harness is a robust cost management tool offering features such as auto-stopping, recommendations, budgets, and forecasts. Organisations can perform what-if analysis and set up alerts and notifications to monitor usage and spending. 

GorillaStack 

GorillaStack provides solutions for Cloud Security, Operations expenditure (OpEx), and data protection. Its automated Cloud Cost Management feature eliminates the need for manual coding, making it user-friendly and efficient. 

Cast 

Cast is a Kubernetes cost monitoring and reporting tool equipped with powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. It recommends optimisations by automatically scanning areas for improvement and help organisations to optimise their cloud spending effectively. 

Granulate

Granulate leverages AI to optimise performance and free up resources in platforms like Google Kubernetes Engine, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). It offers cost optimisation features tailored to specific cloud environments. 

Densify

Densify is a Cloud Management tool that integrates with Azure and AWS, enabling organisations to effectively manage cloud resources and hybrid clouds. Its superior monitoring capabilities allow organisations to optimise resource allocation and reduce costs efficiently. 

Looker

Looker provides insights into service usage and related costs in Azure, enabling organisations to generate reports based on various criteria such as region, product type, or user identity. These insights help organisations allocate resources effectively and optimise cloud spending. 

Kubecost

Kubecost is a versatile tool compatible with platforms like Azure, AWS, GCP, and Kubernetes. It offers deep insights and recommendations to prioritise resources for critical infrastructure, helping organisations save costs and optimise resource allocation effectively. 

BMC Helix Cloud Cost 

BMC Helix Cloud Cost service offers cost management solutions for both private and public clouds. It provides automated alerts to detect cost anomalies and allow organisations to monitor as well as optimise their cloud spending effectively.

How to optimise costs in Azure Platform? 

Azure is a handy platform, but it can be pricey at times. Thus, learning to optimise your Azure Cost Management can save you a lot of money in the long run. Here's how to do it:

Azure Cost Management

Azure Cost Management, a component of Microsoft's toolset, facilitates the analysis, administration, and enhancement of workload expenses within cloud environments. Leveraging features such as Azure management groups, budgets, and recommendations, it aids in cost organisation and strategic planning for cost reduction initiatives.

Azure budgets   

Azure budgets have several beneficial features that can be very handy for optimisation. Let's take a look at some of them below:    

1) Creating a new budget requires allocating a name, amount and period. This way a budget ensures effective Cost Management in Azure.    

2)  Alerts and notifications can promptly notify the organisations if their spending exceeds their set budget.    

3) Organisations can avoid unnecessary overspending by closely monitoring their spending and Cloud usage.    

4) Organisations can continuously receive alerts if a resource or service exceeds their budget within the specified time frame.        

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Advisor   

Azure Cloud Advisor gives personalised recommendations for optimising Azure Cloud Cost Management. It analyses statistics like usage telemetry and resource configuration to provide solutions for improving resource performance, Azure Security Best Practices, and efficiency. Here's how Advisor works:

1) Identifed opportunities to improve performance, security, and reliability and reduce cost by analysing organisation’s Azure Cloud deployment.   

2) Gives suggestions on best practices and provides personalised recommendations based on their usage and Azure resources.   

3) Provides personalised suggestions to implement its recommendations.   

Azure pricing calculator   

Organisations can use the Azure pricing calculator to estimate the cost of Azure services. To determine the price of a service or resource,  they first need to select the resource they want to use. Next, choose the settings and other details on how they want the service to run. Once these details are filled in, the calculator will give an estimated cost for the selected service.  

Cost analysis   

Azure's cost analysis tool lets organisations analyse their spending data. It can accurately check all the costs and use filters to find specific data and details like spending data on different time frames. These features come in very handy when they are trying to detect whether the current bill is accurate or not.

What are the challenges of Azure Cost Management?

The cost of Azure changes based on the services organisations employ, the size and the location. This makes it very difficult to determine the actual cost of Azure and makes them wonder whether they are getting their money's worth or paying more:-    

These same problems are common among the users of Azure's competitors like AWS (Amazon Web Services) and GCP (Google Cloud Platform). Since it is difficult to predict the exact cost, many Azure users are often surprised by their bills.

Apart from this, Microsoft offers some Azure services for free for a certain period. If a user continues using this service after the free trial is over, it will also be added to their next bill.  Users must remember to cancel these services at the right time to be safe from a surprise bill amount.   

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Advantages of Microsoft Azure Cost Management  

Azure Cost Management offers a dual advantage to organisations. Let’s take a look at some of them in the following points:

Streamline Azure cost monitoring and optimisation 

With Azure Cost Management, organisations gain the capability to retrospectively assess Cloud consumption and expenses while also projecting future outlays. They can analyse costs on daily, monthly, or yearly scales to identify trends, irregularities, and routes for cost optimisation. This data is derived directly from Azure and offers a precise breakdown based on the actual units forming the Azure bill.  

Effortlessly align Cloud expenditure with departments or projects 

Azure Cost Management categorises an organisation’s resources into multiple segments using the concept of cost entities. Each cost entity represents a department or project within the organisation responsible for Azure service payments. Additionally, they can design a cost model that organises resources according to tags assigned by teams to their respective Azure resources.  

Teams can leverage Azure Cost Management tool to review and explore costs associated with their specific project budgets once they have accurately defined cost entities and models. They can also establish budgets and alerts to notify or restrict usage for projects, teams, or individual users. 

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Conclusion

After reading this blog, you would have understood what Microsoft Azure Cost Management is and how to optimise your Cost Management strategy with the help of various Cost Management tools. An optimised strategy can impact an organisation's growth and finances.

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