Understanding, Monitoring, and Managing Azure Costs

• Azure usage is billed using metrics that vary widely by service.
• Tools and services can be used to predict, monitor, analyze, and control Azure costs in basic or customized ways.
• Estimating Azure costs is not an exact science, and a trial-and-error period to determine production costs is often unavoidable.

Azure pricing is substantially different from traditional software licensing. Azure services employ a wide array of billing metrics that measure usage by various rates and capacities. Services may have cross-dependencies and costs that are not obvious until after they are deployed. Microsoft provides cost estimation and monitoring tools and features that help deal with Azure spending. However, some Azure cost-managing solutions require planning, configuration, and custom development.

Azure Cost Mechanics

An Azure resource is an instance of a service deployed in Azure, such as a VM or a database. Solutions deployed on Azure typically use multiple resource types. Azure costs are a function of billing metrics that quantify paid usage and allocated capacity for resources, pricing meters based on those metrics, and third-party and support add-ons.