Being able to figure out how much a cloud resource is costing you is key to
staying within budget and making better informed financial decisions.
What tools does Azure offer us to do? Let's take a look.
All right. Let's head into cost management and billing. On the left side,
we're going to click on cost management and under cost management. Once more,
we're going to click on cost analysis. By default,
we should see the accumulated cost view.
This view is great if you want to answer questions like how much have I spent so
far this month? Will I stay within my budget?
The view you're on is going to be displayed here.
We have no filter set and the group is set to none.
We will also see a few more details.
Actual costs shows the total usage and purchase costs for the current
month.
Forecast shows the total forecasted costs for the period you
choose. This is useful to identify potential budget breaches.
Overspending, as you can see,
is represented as a red area and
budget shows the planned spending limit for the selected scope.
And we can switch between budgets here.
We also have the option to use different views.
If we head on to this view dropdown, we have a couple of options.
Let's take a look at costs by resource.
This shows a table of grouped resources sorted by highest cost.
This is useful to answer questions like which resources cost the
most so far this month. And we can see in our case, it is the budget demo VM.
We can switch to daily costs.
This view will show costs for each day,
useful to see irregularities as costs can spike or dip
from day to day.
This view is useful to answer questions like have there been any increases in
the costs per day for the last 30 days? So we can see from the 18th to the 19th,
there's quite a spike there. And it goes a little bit down.
Another view we have is cost by service,
and this shows a spending on services and useful to answer questions like
how has my monthly usage varied over the past three
invoices?
We also have options to group by billing period,
charge type reservation, reassures, et cetera.
And we can also apply filters to our view.
For this demo let's take a look at how much all of our virtual machine resources
are costing us this month.
We're going to switch back to the accumulated view and just make sure group buy
is set to none. On the bottom left.
You should see a pie chart with the service name,
let's click on the virtual machine portion, which is this larger chunk.
And grouped by we're going to select resource and we can
now see how much each virtual machine is costing in total.
And if you select one of them,
a view will generate with the cost of it individually.
One thing to know is our filter.
Since we clicked on the pie chart on the virtual machine section that applies a
filter to the here. So let's click into one of these sections.
We can see our legend tells us that the blue is budget demo VM,
and the purple is cost management demo via one.
I'm going to click into the blue and this is going to generate a view with cost
information specific to this one virtual machine. And there we have it.
You can repeat the same process with any resource name you'd like and feel free
to play around with the different group by options and the different filters
that you can apply.
And that's it, we've explored cost analysis a bit,
and we know that it's the tool we can use to get granular details on what
resources are costing us.
We know that using this tool alongside budgets and cost alerts are the cost
management tools we need to make a better informed financial decisions when it
comes to our Azure environment. Alrighty Cloud Gurus.
That's it for this episode of ACG fundamentals,
let us know how your exploration of costs analysis went in the comments.
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