Azure Cost Management Provides Free Tools

• The free Azure Cost Management service can help track, budget, forecast, alert on, and optimize Azure spending.
• It can help find unnecessary spending and help with the charging of costs to projects and business units.
• It has fewer benefits for customers that are not consuming all of the Azure capacity they have contractually purchased.

The Azure Cost Management service provides reports and other tools for visualizing Azure usage costs to help customers understand how they are using Azure and locate spending anomalies. It enables analysis of historical spending at several levels of detail, and it can forecast future spending based on trends. It can show how spending is tracking to customer-provided budgets and alert users when defined cost thresholds are surpassed. However, the service is still evolving from its origin as a Microsoft-acquired solution.

Cost Charts, Tables, Forecasting, and Budgets

Cost Management is available automatically within Azure subscriptions without requiring customer provisioning. It collects Azure resource usage and billing data (including Azure Marketplace spending), price rates, and other metadata to build charts and tables that can assist in identifying trends such as inefficient or problematic usage of resources that is causing unnecessary costs. Organizations can use the service to produce reports for internal departments or teams to facilitate funding processes and accountability details for Azure usage.