TABLE OF CONTENT
1. Introduction2. What is Azure Cost Management? Azure Cost Management: Top Features Get started with ACM5. Tips to optimize Azure costs6. What’s new in Azure Cost Management7. Conclusion8. CloudThat 9. FAQsIntroduction
Anyone who runs their workloads in the cloud must manage their costs. Azure Cost Management is a free service that Azure customers can use to manage their infrastructure and workloads in Azure. It provides cost information and utilization data on Azure cloud workloads.
It is intended to be used by Cloud Architects and Project Managers, Finance Heads, App Teams, and Software Developers for budgeting, RBAC and greater visibility.
What is Azure Cost Management?
Azure Cost Management (ACM), a cloud-native service that Azure offers to customers, can be accessed through the Azure Portal. This service allows you to analyze cloud service usage, forecast future spending, and even predict them. It allows you to forecast Azure costs and find deviations.
Top Features of Azure Cost Management
Once enabled, it monitors your Azure resources and activities and generates reports.
It integrates with Azure Advisor to provide cost recommendations specific for your usage, right-sizing of resources, and identifying idle resources.
You can customize the cost and usage data by using the cost management REST APIs. This will allow you to create a customized view of your system usage.
It integrates with Microsoft Power BI for exporting your data and conducting a thorough analysis.
Get started with ACM
Log in to Azure portal (portal.azure.com). Navigate to the management blade by searching cost management.

Azure Cost Analysis:
The cost analysis provides past and forecasted cost details for up to 12 month. This tool allows you to accurately analyze expenses and allows for you to group and filter across resources.
You can select the scope for which cost data are desired. You can choose to see the root management group, or an individual subscription. Filter as per your needs (daily/monthly/yearly).

You can use the group by filter to obtain usage reports for many parameters such as location, department, resource, and resource groups. You can also group by resource to get another report that will allow you to determine if they are needed or can be optimized.
Exports under Settings can also be used to schedule an export of reports to a storage account. To view Azure consumption insights in your Power BI dashboard, you can use the Power BI connector

Azure Budgets:
This tool allows you set up a budget and monitor your Azure services usage to determine if it has exceeded or fallen below the limit. You can also set an automatic trigger to alert you if your budget exceeds a certain amount.

Azure Advisor:
Azure Advisor offers a personalized recommendation based on your usage data. It helps you optimize your resources for greater cost-effectiveness and reliability, as well as security. It provides recommendations for the best practices and specific actions to take on your azure resources.

Tips to optimize Azure costs
Choose the best compute service for your workload
Reserve computing resources to support your constant workload
Don’t overprovision the resources. Start with the minimum and increase capacity based upon the usage.
When they are not being used, you can stop or delete the azure resource.
Only scale your resources when traffic dictates
Track the budget and spend across teams and projects
You can use the Cost management Service to obtain reports on your actual spending. Then, take specific actions to optimize your spending.