Updates Improve Azure Cost Control

• The Azure Cost Management service receives regular updates to improve its Azure cost-tracking, budgeting, forecasting, and alerting capabilities.
• Azure Cost Management features vary by customer license type.
• Opportunities to save on Azure, such as price cuts, come often, but customers must seek out the savings, which may require deployment changes.

The Azure Cost Management (ACM) service provides reports and other tools for visualizing Azure usage costs to help customers understand how they are using Azure and locate spending anomalies.

Price cuts, expanded reservations offerings, and improved Advisor recommendations help customers cut Azure costs for certain deployments. (See the sidebar “Recent Azure Cost-Savings Opportunities.” )

Azure Cost Management Service

ACM is available automatically within Azure subscriptions without requiring customer provisioning. It collects Azure resource usage and billing data, 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 also can use the service to produce reports for internal departments or teams to facilitate funding processes and accountability details for Azure usage.