>> Hello there and thank you very much for joining us
today in this new Azure Portal How-To Video. Today we'll
learn about the views that are available in cost analysis
to gain insights into your Azure spending. And we have
Alan Wise, who’s going to teach us all about those views.
So, thank you very much for joining us today, Adam.
>> Yeah, thanks so much for having me here, Leon. Super
excited to talk about cost management and views and cost
analysis. For those of you that aren't aware of cost
management, it's the set of tools that are available for you
in the Azure Portal that allow you to analyze, manage, and
optimize your spending within Azure.
So from the analysis perspective, we've got the cost
analysis tool for you that lets you slice and dice your costs.
Management perspective, we've got a budgets tool that
lets you set thresholds on your spending so that you can
get alerts as you're spending accrues. And from the
optimization standpoint, we've got recommendations
provided by Azure on various configuration changes and
purchases that you can make to optimize your spending in
the cloud.
So, today specifically I'll be talking about some prebaked
views that we have in cost analysis for you that sort of
give you quick insights into how you're spending is
accruing throughout the month. And at that point, let's
jump into it.
>> Let's do it.
>> So, here we are in the portal. We’re on the
subscription blade here. You can see sort of the overview
for this subscription. In order to access cost management
and some of the functionality there, you can see that the
tools are available from the menu from the subscription
blade. So, we've got our cost analysis tool, alerts, budgets
and recommendations as
well. So in order to look at some
of those views that I'm going to be discussing today, you
want to be using this cost
analysis tool here. So, let's dive
on into it.
So, I've clicked cost analysis at this point. And now I'm
directed to the first prebaked view that I'll discuss with you
guys, which is the accumulated cost view. If you're looking
to see some of the other
views that are available to you as
well, you can click on the view button up at the top here
and you can navigate between some of these prebaked
views, each of which I'll be discussing briefly today. So,
this accumulated cost view is a great tool to use to see
how you're spending is
accruing throughout the course of
the month. So, you can see here that I can see the
spending as it’s accrued since the 1st of November.
A great thing as well as you can see, the spending as it's
accruing in comparison to budgets that you're setting as
well. So as you can see, I've got a budget here of $1,000
and I've got a forecast chart as well so that I can see how
my spending is forecasted also. And you can see here that
I'm currently actually forecasted
to exceed my budget on
the 11th of November, so that might be something for me
to go investigate a little more, potentially change some of
the spending patterns within this subscription if I want to
remain in this budget. So, again, the accumulated cost
view is a great quick way to check how your costs are
trending throughout the month so that you can sort of
proactively manage those costs in response to budgets or
just in general, if you're looking to be proactive about
managing costs, which we would always highly recommend
here at Azure.
So, moving on to the second view that's available to you,
you've got the cost by
resource view. So, this is a great
way to see how you're spending in a tabular view, for each
resource in the given
subscription. So, you can see here
that we’re actually, the table by default will show you cost
from the most expensive resource down to the least
expensive resource. So, this Type 817 virtual machine
scale set costs $15 at this point throughout the month,
and is the most costly resource in the subscription.
Another great feature of this tool as well is we've got a
caret here that you can click down on and that allows you
to see the different meters that are accruing cost for the
resource. So in this case, we've got three different meters
for this Type 817 resource that are accruing charges for
the given month, and it looks like the majority of the cost
is on this one D15V2 compute meter. So for those of you
that aren't familiar with the Azure billing model, Azure
when you spin up a resource has multiple meters that get
associated with that resource and those meters are
actually what's responsible for the charges that you see on
your bill. And those are the meters that emit the charges.
So in this case, there's three meters for this virtual
machine, so that's an important thing to just keep in mind
is that you're spinning up resources, but there will be
multiple aspects of that resource that will be accruing
charges throughout the month.
So now moving into our next view here that we have
available for you, is the daily costs view. So, this is a great
way for you to be able to see throughout the month how
your costs are actually being accrued on each individual
day. And what we've also done in this view for you is we
are grouping those costs by resource group, so you can
see the distribution per
resource group in the subscription
of your costs for every day. So, you can see here, for
example, the daily costs have sort of taken a dip on
October 20th it looks like, and then kind of gone back up
again on the 21st. So, this gives you a good, quick, easy
way to maybe see if a change is made in a subscription on
a certain day and the daily
cost jumps up significantly, that
might be something to
investigate. So, again, think of this
daily cost to you as your way to understand for every day
in the month, how is the cost being charged on that
particular day.
So, now moving into the next view that we have available
for you is this cost by service view. And so for this, I had
mentioned that we accrue costs based off of meters, so
those meters are associated with a specific service. So in
this case, you can see the costs for the last three months
grouped by those common services that are associated
with the meter. So in this case, for example, you can see
the majority of the cost on each month in the month of
August, September, and
October, the majority of the cost
for this subscription on each of those months has come
from the Azure App Service. And so, that just gives you a
quick idea of what types of resources across your
subscription are accruing the most cost for, in this case,
with this view, the last three months.
So now moving into the final prebaked view that we have
for you, is the invoice details view. And so, this is a great
way to quickly understand and be able to reconcile the
charges that are on your
bill. So the bill that you receive
at the end of the month is the aggregated charges grouped
by the specific meter. So, for example, you could have
multiple VMs that are using this D15V2 meter. All of those
VMs would roll up into this one charge on your invoice. So,
this gives you a great way to see in our tooling in the
portal how the charges on your invoice actually are being
accrued and from there, this gives you sort of some base
information to be able to go and analyze the data further
yourself with some of the graphical tools that you can use
in cost analysis to further slice and dice. So, for example,
you can see here that in the past month, so for example
this is the invoice details view of October 2020, so that
means that this view aligns exactly with your bill in
October. So, you had a $510 charge for your D2 Series
Windows VM in the month of October, so this would be a
great thing to go and use some of the tools that we have
in cost analysis to further slice
and dice and maybe identify
what are the resources that actually roll into this D Series
Windows VM.
So, that sort of wraps up some of the views that we have
to give you a quick insights across your invoice from the
past month, your daily cost is there accruing, or the cost
for this current month and how it's trending against the
budget. And all of these are available through the views
button in cost analysis and are meant to empower you to
be able to proactively manage your costs within Azure and
understand them as quickly as possible.
>> Thank you very much, Alan. This was great. And
thanks, every one of you, for watching. Please just try this
out and let us know what you think. Leave us a comment
in the comment section, follow us on Twitter and look
forward seeing you in the next video. Thanks for watching.