“Azure can be incredibly cost-effective if you understand how to optimize your resource usage, but neglecting to monitor and manage costs can lead to a hefty bill." I believe the same holds true for any Cloud infrastructure. Azure is easy to manage, the orchestration layer is intuitive and you pay what you consume. But what do you consume is a million dollar question. A click to add a simple-looking resource can cost you $1. The amount looks small however this can be a per month or per minute or per second pricing and can start accumulating over time. Often IT admins or your customers ignore this initially and when this cost goes out of control, the panic begins.
Now the environment is in production, and you cannot remove the resource, but there is pressure to reduce the cost from the CxOs. Don’t panic, fortunately, Microsoft provides a wonderful intuitive tool in Azure called Cost Analysis. This comes to your rescue.
About the tool!!
Cost Analysis is the inbuilt tool that can help you understand where the cost is heading, and helps you to generate the reports that can be analysed offline or shared with CxOs. You can:
- Visualize the cost
- Generate costing reports
- Create budget alerts - Daily or Monthly
- View the accumulated cost, forecast cost
- Works on any resource group, Management group, Subscriptions and billing accounts.
Where do you find it?
Login to Azure portal (https://portal.azure.com) with your admin account to view the cost for the entire subscription. Search for Cost Analysis in the Search bar and under Reporting+Analytics you can find the Cost Analysis.
What would you like to monitor to reduce cost?
- Unwanted Virtual Machines - VMs when shutdown consumes all the resources and incur cost.
- Deallocate the VM - this will remove the compute cost. Use this only when you need the VM or it is meant to be decommissioned and don’t want to retain the assign Dynamic IPs
- Storage accounts – Some containers like premium file shares cost you on th total allocated storage. Keep a buffer of free space as per your requirement and reduce the size accordingly whenever possible (weekly or monthly checks should be fine)
- Monitor Snapshots - Snapshots can build over time and often goes unnoticed. Delete any old Snapshots that are no longer required. Make sure when you create the snapshot, write a description or a reason of creating the snapshot.
- Tags - These are your best friends to easily recognize the resources in Cost Analysis.
- Set alerts 20% lower than your actual budget. This gives you time to take action and clean up the unnecessary resources
- Weekly or biweekly checks on all the Resources.
- Keep a close watch on the small resource public IPs, Private endpoints, NICs etc. The cost for these resources seems to be small, but it accumulates when and admin creates them for testing and then forgets to remove it.
- Check Azure Pricing Calculator before creating any resource.
Manage Azure Cost