Cost Management

The free Microsoft Cost Management (MCM, formerly 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.

Service Overview

MCM 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.

MCM is available automatically within Azure subscriptions without customer provisioning. It builds charts and tables from Azure resource usage and billing data, price rates, and other metadata. MCM 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.