Azure Cost Analysis: Simple Way to track you Cloud Cost

Azure Cost Analysis is a tool that helps organizations get insights into your Azure usage costs. It helps businesses make informed decisions, track budgets, allocate expenses, and save costs. In this article let’s explore Azure Cost Analysis, its features, usage steps, and common challenges. We’ll also look at how third-party tools like Economize can improve Azure cost management.

What is Azure Cost Analysis?

Azure Cost Analysis is a feature of Azure Cost Management. It helps businesses track, monitor, and understand their cloud expenses. It gives detailed views of your Azure costs. It helps users analyze expenses by service, resource, and other dimensions. Through Azure Cost Analysis, users can visualize spending trends, allocate costs to different projects, and set budgets, which helps in proactive financial management.

How to use the Azure Cost Analysis Dashboard?

The Azure Cost Analysis dashboard serves as a central interface used to access all critical cost metrics in one view. This dashboard shows the latest spending trends and helps to spot issues early. It lets users highlight specific metrics with configurable widgets. These include high-cost resources, budget adherence, and cost anomalies. The dashboard uses data visualization and custom KPIs to make faster, more informed cost decisions.

Upon opening the Azure Cost Analysis dashboard, users can:

• Review top KPIs, such as Total Spend and Cost per Resource.
• Use the filters and date range selectors to align views with specific projects or timeframes. This will enable more accurate tracking.
• Use budget widgets to track spending against set budgets from the dashboard. This will reduce the chance of unexpected overruns.

Understanding and Customizing the Azure Cost Analysis Report

The Azure Cost Analysis report provides detailed insights into cloud spending. It breaks down costs by dimensions like resource, service, and subscription. This report is customizable and helps teams analyze monthly spending patterns. It ensures more granular tracking of expenses and monitors how it evolves over time.

Steps to Create and Customize a Report

1. Access Cost Analysis Reports: Go to Azure Cost Management’s Cost Analysis section. Select or create a new report template based on business needs.
2. Define Key Metrics and Filters: Customize report filters. Choose specific resource groups, subscriptions, or service types. Applying these filters allows users to drill down into more targeted cost details.
3. Generate Periodic Reports: Regularly scheduled reports, like monthly or quarterly ones, help track long-term cost trends. They also pinpoint high-cost resources that recur.
4. Export and Share: Export reports in Excel or CSV format for sharing across teams. This facilitates collaborative budgeting and cost management discussions, particularly for complex organizations.

Step-by-step tutorial to analyze Azure costs with smart views?

Smart Views, such as the Resources view, is a useful feature for new users. Smart views are pre-configured, intelligent views that offer key metrics and insights:

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Summarize key spending metrics and show total and average costs to help users grasp spending trends.
• Intelligent Cost Insights: Identify unusual spikes or dips in costs with anomaly detection. This helps you spot any irregularities in resource usage.
• Detailed Breakdown: Allows users to drill down into specific cost contributors, such as a resource, service, or product. This helps them understand expenses at a deeper level.

When opening a smart view, users can adjust the date range to view costs for different time periods. By default, the views might show a recent timeframe, like the current month or the last 30 days. This can be changed to suit different reporting needs. KPIs at the top of the view, like Total Cost and Average Cost, help users track if costs meet expectations.

How to Analyzing Azure Costs with Smart Views

• Open a Smart View: Begin by selecting a view, like Resources, in Azure Cost Analysis. Each view gives a snapshot of key cost metrics and insights, based on your selection.

• Check Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): At the top, you’ll see metrics like Total Cost (current spending and change from the previous period) and Average Cost (indicating cost trends). Use these to keep spending on track.
• Adjust Date Range: Set custom timeframes using the date picker or arrows. For instance, the Reservations view defaults to the last 30 days for tracking reservation use.
• Enable Forecasts: To plan for upcoming expenses, enable the Forecast KPI in Cost Management Labs. This feature estimates future costs based on current trends.
• Set a Budget: If you haven’t already, create a budget under the Budget KPI. You can choose monthly, quarterly, or yearly budgets to help prevent unexpected overspending.
• Explore Cost Insights: Below the KPIs, find insights into major cost contributors, anomalies, and usage patterns. Select See Insights for a deeper look into spending patterns.
• Identify Top Cost Contributors: The table view displays costs by categories, such as subscriptions or resources. Expand rows for breakdowns like product meters or individual resources.

• Drill Down for Detail: Select rows to dig into more specific costs. Use the menu (⋯) for shortcuts, like filtering by location or resource group, to refine your view.
• Switch Between Views and Apply Filters: Each smart view is customizable. Use filters or group data differently to explore costs from multiple perspectives.
• Visualize Daily Trends: Enable the Chart Preview feature in Cost Management Labs to see daily spending trends, helpful for spotting usage spikes.

Challenges while using Azure Cost Analysis

Azure Cost Analysis is a useful tool for tracking cloud costs. However, users often face some common challenges. Here are some of the key issues:

1. Complex Cost Allocation: It’s hard to allocate costs accurately across multiple projects, departments, or teams, especially in large organizations. Azure’s native cost analysis may lack the granularity needed to assign precise costs to each resource group or team.
2. Limited Report Customization: Azure Cost Analysis has basic reporting. But, it’s hard to create detailed, custom reports for specific business needs. Users often need to export data for more in-depth analysis, which adds time and complexity.
3. Tracking Long-Term Trends: Analyzing cost trends over long periods can be hard. Azure Cost Analysis focuses only on current or recent expenses. This limitation makes it hard to identify patterns over time, which is essential for strategic budget planning.
4. Complex Pricing Structures: Azure’s pricing can be intricate. This is especially true for organizations using multiple services with various billing options (e.g., pay-as-you-go, reserved instances). Understanding exactly where costs come from often requires additional effort beyond Azure Cost Analysis.
5. Tagging Consistency: Azure Cost Analysis by tagging helps with cost tracking. But, it’s hard to tag resources consistently. Incomplete cost reports result from inconsistent or missing tags. They make it harder to get an accurate financial picture.
6. Lack of Real-Time Cost Monitoring: Azure Cost Analysis often has a delay in data reporting, meaning that users can’t see real-time costs. For companies needing immediate visibility into their spending, this can lead to unexpected charges.
7. Forecasting Limitations: Accurate budget forecasting in Azure Cost Analysis is hard. It mainly uses historical data, without predictive insights. For organizations needing accurate forecasts to manage budgets, these limitations make planning difficult.
8. Limited Automation Options: Azure Cost Analysis has limited automation. It can only set alerts for spending limits and budget notifications. Users need to manually monitor costs, which increases the risk of missing budget overruns or anomalies.

Addressing these challenges often requires an external tool. Those tools should provide advanced insights, automation, and better cost control.

How to Overcome Azure Cost Analysis Challenges with Economize?

Azure Cost Analysis has basic tools for tracking cloud expenses. But, it often falls short in managing complex cloud costs. This is where Economize steps in. It provides a platform that addresses these challenges. It delivers real-time insights, tailored recommendations, and better visibility. Here’s how Economize can help you tackle the most common Azure Cost Analysis challenges and optimize your cloud spending.

1. Instant Connection and Continuous Optimization

Connecting cloud accounts in Economize is fast and seamless. With just a few clicks, you can link AWS accounts or GCP projects. This lets Economize start scanning for cost-saving opportunities. Unlike Azure Cost Analysis, Economize needs no manual input or oversight. It monitors your cloud spend in real-time, keeping it in check at all times. This continuous, agentless setup ensures you’re always identifying savings without extra effort.

2. Simplified Cost Allocation and Resource Tracking

Azure’s native cost allocation can be hard to manage. This is especially true when resources lack consistent tags or need more detailed breakdowns. Economize’s asset inventory centralizes all your cloud resources. It gives you full visibility of your assets and cost distribution.

You can view detailed breakdowns by services, resources, and labels. This ensures costs are accurately allocated across projects, teams, or departments. With this clarity, you can make informed decisions on resource utilization and spending.

3. Deep Insights and Actionable Recommendations

Economize goes beyond basic cost analysis. It uses smart insights to find trends, savings, and unusual spending spikes. Its Recommendations Engine gives customized, actionable suggestions. These include rightsizing and optimizing underused resources.

Economize helps you optimize cloud usage and control spending. It provides insights that Azure Cost Analysis may miss.

4. Advanced Cost Visualization and Smart Filtering

Understanding the nuances of cloud spending can be overwhelming with standard reports. Economize provides interactive, intuitive charts. It gives an aerial view of cloud spending by specific projects or services. This offers a clearer picture of your costs.

You can use advanced filters to slice and dice data by resource, label, or service. This will uncover insights and optimize specific parts of your cloud environment.

5. Forecasting and Trend Analysis

Azure’s limited forecasting makes it hard to plan budgets. Economize’s Cost Timeline and Cost Comparison features offer a long-term view of cost trends. This helps you track changes and compare expenses over time.

By visualizing past and future costs, you can spot spending trends. This helps you set better budgets and avoid overspending.

Conclusion 

While Azure Cost Analysis helps track expenses, it lacks depth and flexibility for proactive cloud cost management. Economize fills these gaps. It offers real-time monitoring, actionable recommendations, enhanced cost visualization, and advanced forecasting tools.

By integrating Economize, businesses can overcome the challenges of Azure Cost Analysis and achieve a more optimized, efficient, and cost-effective cloud environment.

Feeling the Weight of High Cloud Bills?

Controlling your cloud budget doesn’t have to be complicated. With Economize, we make it easy to slash your costs by up to 30%. Schedule a free demo today and begin your journey towards more manageable cloud spending. Start seeing the benefits in your budget right away.