Monitoring, Analyzing, and Controlling Azure Costs

• Azure invoices and usage reports can be used to analyze costs.
• Azure management features, such as alerts that can be generated when cost thresholds are surpassed and spending anomalies are detected, can help monitor and control costs.
• Custom processes and third-party tools are typically necessary to manage costs for complex Azure deployments.

 

Azure customers have access to monitoring and analysis tools to understand spending, cost-control management features to prevent overspending, and custom and third-party offerings for when Azure’s built-in features fall short. All will be needed to manage large deployments.

Cost Monitoring and Analysis

The basic tools to monitor and understand costs are Azure invoices and usage reports. However, most organizations will want to consider additional specialized services for cost monitoring and analysis.

Invoices

Azure invoices are issued monthly. They can be viewed by administrators with appropriate access in the Azure portal, and they optionally can be received in e-mail. Historical invoices remain available for online viewing. Invoices summarize monthly Azure consumption by subscription (a group of deployed Azure resources with a common payment method) and resource operations (such as overall Azure Storage Tables reads and writes) in PDF format.