Microsoft Azure is one of the leading cloud computing platforms today, offering over 200 products and cloud services worldwide. These products enable you to build, deploy, and manage applications across cloud environments, on-premises systems, at the edge, etc. As more and more companies move their operations to the cloud, handling costs in Azure has become a crucial aspect of cloud management.
This article covers the basics of Azure Cost Management, a free solution for Azure users, and provides some tips and best practices for keeping your costs under control.
What is Azure Cost Management?
Azure Cost Management is a suite of tools and services that helps you manage and optimize your Azure spending. It provides visibility into your usage and costs, identifies potential cost savings opportunities, and enables you to reduce your spending.
Once you enable Azure Cost Management, it constantly monitors and tracks your resources, providing various reports to help you make informed decisions. You can also integrate Azure Advisor with Azure Cost Management to access customized recommendations according to your usage. Not only that, but you can also integrate Power BI with it by employing REST APIs.
Azure Cost Management consists of two primary components: cost analysis and budgeting. Let’s analyze these.
1. Cost Analysis
Cost analysis provides a detailed breakdown of your Azure usage and costs. It allows you to track your spending over time, identify trends, and go deeper into specific resources or services to determine how much they cost you.
Some of the key features of Azure Cost Management’s cost analysis component include the following:
- Cost breakdown: A detailed breakdown of your spending by resource, service, and location.
- Cost history: A history of your spending over time, with the ability to view spending by day, week, or month.
- Usage details: A detailed breakdown of your usage by resource or service.
- Cost alerts: The ability to set alerts when your spending exceeds a certain threshold.
2. Budgeting
Budgeting allows you to set spending targets and track your progress toward those targets. It provides alerts when you’re on track to exceed your budget and helps you identify areas where you can cut costs. Some of the significant features of budgeting include the following:
- Budget creation: The ability to create budgets for specific services or resources.
- Budget tracking: Real-time tracking of your spending against your budget.
- Budget alerts: The ability to set alerts when you’re on track to exceed your budget.
7 Tips and Best Practices for Azure Cost Management
Now that we’ve covered the basics of Azure Cost Management, let’s take a look at some tips and best practices for keeping your cloud costs under control.
1. Use Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor is a free service that provides personalized recommendations for optimizing your Azure resources. It can help you identify cost-saving opportunities, security vulnerabilities, and performance issues.
Azure Advisor provides recommendations in four categories: cost, security, performance, and high availability. In the cost category, it provides recommendations for reducing your spending by optimizing your resource usage, selecting the right Azure VM size, and using reserved instances.
2. Azure Cost Calculator
The Azure Cost Calculator is a tool that allows you to estimate your monthly Azure costs based on your resource usage. You can use it to compare the prices of different Azure services and configurations and to identify cost-saving opportunities.
The Azure Cost Calculator takes into account factors such as resource usage, data transfer, and storage costs and allows you to adjust these factors to see how they affect your overall costs.
3. Azure Resource Graph
Azure Resource Graph is a powerful tool for querying and analyzing your Azure resources. It allows you to perform complex queries across all of your Azure resources and visualize the results in a variety of ways.
You can use Azure Resource Graph for a range of purposes, including cost management. Moreover, you can use it to identify underutilized resources, analyze cost trends over time, and drill down into specific resources to see how much they cost.
4. Use Resource Tagging
Resource tagging allows you to organize your Azure cloud resources and track your spending by resource group, project, or department. This can help you identify areas where you’re overspending and take action to reduce your costs.
5. Azure Reserved Instances
Azure Reserved Instances allow you to pre-pay for Azure virtual machines, resulting in significant cost savings over pay-as-you-go pricing. This is an excellent option if you have predictable usage patterns and want to reduce your costs.
With Azure Reserved Instances, you can save up to 72% on your Azure VM costs compared to the pay-as-you-go pricing model. You can also purchase reservations for one or three years and choose from different payment options depending on your needs.
6. Set Up Cost Alerts
Setting up cost alerts can help you stay on top of your spending and avoid unexpected bills. You can set alerts based on spending thresholds or usage patterns and receive notifications via email or SMS.
7. Azure Cost Management APIs
Azure Cost Management APIs allow you to manage your Azure spending programmatically. You can use these APIs to automate tasks, such as setting up cost alerts, retrieving usage data, and analyzing cost trends.
Using Azure Cost Management APIs, you can integrate cost management into your existing workflows and automate cost-saving measures. This can help you achieve greater cost efficiency and reduce manual labor.
Conclusion
The cloud computing industry is set to grow rapidly in the coming years. Companies are shifting their operations to the cloud, and therefore, managing costs in Azure is a critical aspect of cloud management.
Azure Cost Management empowers you with the right set of tools and services that enable you to manage your cloud spending efficiently and effectively. It allows you to see your spending, identify cost-saving opportunities, and take the necessary action to reduce your cloud costs. We have listed the tips and best practices for Azure Cost Management in this article; you can use these to keep your Azure spending under control and maximize your return on investment.
If you want further assistance in managing your cloud spending, contact us at [email protected]. Our DevOps and Cloud team would love to explore ways of helping you achieve your cost optimization goals for Azure app service.