Allocating Azure Costs

• Organizations often need to divide Azure spending so it can be charged appropriately to internal teams, customers, and partners.
• An Azure Cost Management feature can help calculate proportional costs for shared Azure resources to facilitate organizational billing processes.
• The feature does not meter resource usage by the sharing parties nor affect Microsoft invoices to Azure customers, and it is in a long-running preview.

The cost allocation feature of the Azure Cost Management service lets organizations set rules that estimate the proportional costs of Azure resources, such as VMs, databases, and virtual networks, that are shared across internal departments or require billing to external entities. The feature could help an organization create processes that allocate Azure spending to internal groups or to customers and partners who use proportions of the organization’s deployed Azure resources.

Why Subdivide Azure Spending?

Microsoft bills Azure spending with invoices that roll up charges for each Azure subscription. Usage details reports, which are separate from invoices, provide more granular information on Azure consumption, including daily meter charges for each resource in a deployment.