

One of the more useful features of Azure Cost Management is its Power BI connector. Costs can be organised by the services you’re using and the resource groups you’ve deployed. Along with traditional graphs, donut charts give you a quick way to pivot around different variables, finding the right area to explore and analyse. Along with costs, the service can predict what your future expenditure will look like, comparing it with your current budget. Using the Cost Analysis option, you can see what’s been spent, and what’s likely to be spent. Tools like this help you track down what services are costing you the most and how they’re being used, and how you’re paying for them. Using this you can quickly see how you’re spending money, drilling down into locations, services, and resource groups. The tools are available in the Azure Portal, available through the Cost Management + Billing option. Microsoft has started bundling the various tools that used to help you understand your Azure bills into a more comprehensive suite for managing and predicting costs, as well as finding ways of keeping your bills down. What’s needed is a way to simplify data collection, making it easier to understand what you’re spending and why. At the same time, it prevents you from optimising your bills to get the most bang for your buck. This unpredictability hinders cloud services as they attempt to deliver a global infrastructure that makes it easier to plan data centre capacity.

The result is a mix of complex pieces of data that makes it hard to predict what the right balance of dynamic and reserved cloud services should be for your business. Alongside them, they’ve introduced technologies, like reserved instances, that offer cheaper access to resources while locking you into longer-term contracts. Cloud providers have implemented many different tools and technologies to help you manage your cloud resources, with APIs that give access to billing systems and to the data used to calculate your bills.
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That might have been the case in the early days, when virtual machine sprawl and inconsistent management and governance tooling meant it was easy to suddenly be presented with a bill for many thousands of dollars, when all you’d thought you were paying for were a couple of virtual machines and a small development database. One of the perennial myths about working with cloud computing resources is that it’s near-impossible to predict and manage costs. If you're using Microsoft's cloud, Azure Cost Management + Billing really is an essential service. Microsoft Azure: These tools will help you track your cloud computing spend
