To control and optimize Azure costs, you should know how to track the cost on your azure resources. In this article, I will guide you with in-built features of Azure portal to analysis the cost.
For new subscriptions, it takes up to 48 hours before you can use Cost management features.
Let’s start by signing in to Azure Portal. You can search for Cost Management in the search bar, Cost Management options should be visible on the left navigation pane. The scope can be changed if you need to review the same at different scope such as Resource group, Subscription etc.
As you can see, Cost Management has Cost Analysis, Cost alerts, Budgets and Advisor recommendation that will help in tracking and managing the cost.
Cost Analysis
You can review actual and forecast cost of your azure resources from the azure portal. To review the cost, click on Scope in the Azure portal and select Cost analysis in the menu. For example, go to Resource groups, select a resource group from the list, and then select Cost analysis in the menu.
I have observed that Cost management feature is visible only on parent resources. For instance, we can see this feature on a Resource group but not on Virtual machine or storage account within that resource group. So, can’t we analyse cost for a particular resource? Well, the good news is that we can. There are built-in views available to review costs based on different criteria such cost by resource to view cost for individual resources, accumulated costs for all resources, daily costs etc.
Another useful filter is to apply date range which is used to view the costs in terms of weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly. In fact, we can enter a custom date range to view the data for specific period.
Cost analysis can be done at subscription level also which provides actual and forecast costs of all resource groups in that subscription.
Please note that you need at least read access of your azure account to view cost data. If you have a new subscription, then it might take up to 48 hours before you can use all cost management features in Azure portal.
Cost Alerts
To setup alerts, we need to create a budget for the particular scope.
We can set up alerts based on actual or forecast budget and define our budget.
Email Ids of recipients should be added for alerts.
Budget
Budget option in Cost Management is nothing but the one we have setup in above step. We can change or delete the budget any time.
Advisor recommendations
As the name suggests, Azure recommendations provides Microsoft’s best practices recommendations in terms of cost, security, optimizations etc. The recommendations are categorized in High Impact, Medium Impact and Low Impact. You can see the number of resources impacted for recommendation.
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