Azure Cost Management Service Offered at No Cost

• The Azure Cost Management service can help optimize and predict Azure usage to reduce unnecessary spending and track budget consumption.
• The service 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 Azure is being used and find opportunities for optimizing costs. The service 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, alert users when defined cost thresholds are surpassed, and offer suggestions for adjusting resource sizes to reduce costs while still meeting demands. The service, which also can track Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) costs, uses technology acquired with Cloudyn in 2017.

Capabilities

Cost Management, a light integration of Cloudyn tools into Azure, became freely available to all Azure customers in Sept. 2017. The tools are accessed using the previously available Cloudyn Web-based portal, which is separate from (but launchable from) the Azure portal. The service extracts customer usage and billing data, price rates, and other metadata from Azure to build reports and charts that can assist in identifying trends to help set future budgets and locating inefficient or problematic usage of resources that is causing unnecessary costs.