Azure offers tools to help you manage your Azure costs, similar to AWS Cost Explorer and GCP Cost Management. Azure Cost Management is a tool provided by Microsoft and is free of charge for Azure users.

This article summarizes how Azure Cost Management can be used effectively, especially for those who are beginning to feel the challenges of cost management as their Azure usage fees increase.

The basic concept of managing cloud costs is no different from other public clouds.

1. Cloud Cost Visualization

2. Cloud Cost Analysis

3. Cost Optimization

Azure Cost Management helps you visualize your cloud costs. It can be configured to accurately visualize/monitor usage fees and track daily cost trends.

Key Azure Cost Management leverage methods:

1. Monitor costs to avoid budget overruns

2. Identify high usage costs within Azure services

3. Identifying causes of over-budget

Analysis methods utilizing Azure Cost Management:

By using Azure Cost Management, you can analyze past, present, and future costs. Filtering and monitoring daily costs can help prevent budget overruns.

Scope：

Specifying the scope narrows down the analysis range. You can specify management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups.

Time：

Specify the time axis.

Axis：

Specify the analysis unit, such as daily or hourly

Group：

You can filter the charges you want to analyze by specifying resources, services, resource groups, resource types, etc.

Azure has methods for grouping resources separately from tags. By using resource groups, you can group costs by department, environment, common infrastructure, etc., and make cost management more efficient. Combining resource groups and tags allows for cost analysis from various angles, which is helpful when considering Azure usage and operational methods.

Resource Groups:

Large groupings and grouping by cost management methods are recommended. However, if you can manage with multiple subscriptions, that is also fine.

Environment

Department

Service

Project

Tags：

Tags are useful for analyzing costs on a finer scale than subscriptions and resource groups, such as the purpose of resource usage, common infrastructure costs, or resources that need to be allocated to departments.タグはサ

Azure Budget

Azure Budget allows you to set a budget for time and usage fees and send notifications when exceeded. Setting a budget initially helps detect and address the possibility of exceeding the budget, enabling cost control. When setting a budget, specify the name, time axis, and percentage of the budget. It is recommended to set multiple layers for the settings. For example, at 70%, alert the person in charge, and at over 90%, alert a mailing list. This separation of layers helps to cultivate cost consciousness throughout the company. If you haven't set it up yet, it's a good idea to do so immediately.

About Azure Advisor

Azure has a feature called "Azure Advisor" that supports cost reduction. It's a separate feature from Cost Management but can be used for cost management and optimization. Azure Advisor shows services with potential for cost reduction from existing Azure resources, so it's a good place to start cost reduction. Azure Advisor displays recommendations based on Azure's best practices. It shows recommendations from the perspectives of cost optimization, performance, security, availability, etc., and detects problematic resources from existing resources.

Summary

This article briefly introduced Azure Cost Management and Azure Advisor. Because cost management methods vary by company, it's necessary to devise analysis methods and filtering techniques. The resource groups and tags mentioned previously can be useful for analysis when linked with resources, so it's recommended to establish operational methods based on Azure's best practices.

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