Welcome to this video which provides an Overview
of Azure Cost Management –
my name is Terry Clancy
Azure Cost Management (ACM)
is a native Azure service, designed to allow customers and partners
to gain complete visibility and control
of their Cloud spend across Azure
and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
It is designed to be used by “Managers”,
who are responsible for budgets and the bottom line,
“Finance users” who are responsible for managing funds,
creating budgets and enforcing compliance & governance,
and “App teams” including the developers
who actually use the services
of Azure or AWS.
ACM is designed so that each of
three personas can use it in a
continuous iterative process
made up of three stages, the first being “Visibility”
which means understanding where the charges are coming from,
how they relate to your invoice, and, being able to slice and dice and drill down into that
data. The second is “Accountability”
which means making sure that the teams responsible for charges,
are made accountable for them, and,
that they stay within budget. The third stage is optimization
which means further reducing cost by identifying wastage,
and optimizing resources & VM sizes,
or ,by taking advantage of Microsoft specific benefits
such as Reserved Instances. This ensures cost accountability across
teams, as well optimizing cloud resource usage
to maximize cloud investment potential.
It also allows you to implement better financial governance across
cloud based assets and spend.
Azure Cost Management helps you make sense of what can be a very
complex expenditure. For example
as you can see here
Azure has a great many Infrastructure and Platform Services.
Line of Business applications can use
complex combinations of these.
Azure Cost Management makes it much easier to group and categorize
spend by your specific Applications,
Cost Centers, and Environments,
as well as anything else that is helpful for your organization.
To separate out the costs for an application for example,
there are multiple approaches. You always start by
selecting a scope that encompasses all the resources you want to
include, and you can filter on the
built in dimensions like Resource
Resource Group or Subscription
to select the components used by your
application, other components will then be excluded.
Alternatively, you can apply custom tags
to all the resources used by the application
and then filter on them.
Azure Cost Management supports Pay as you Go,
Enterprise Agreement (EA), MSDN
a range of Visual Studio offers, , Azure Government,
and Microsoft Customer Agreements
but over time will support all Azure Offers.
For the currently supported Azure Offers
please see https://aka.ms
/costmgmt
/data . That page provides a lot of detail about the
supported offers and the dates from which
data is collected for each offer.
For Azure Customers ACM is on by default with a data latency
of 8 to 24 hours.
For AWS, the service must be setup separately.
To access Azure Cost Management, open the Azure Portal
(portal.azure.com) and select:
Cost Management + Billing
Then select Cost Management and Azure Cost Management
This generally consits of Cost Analysis,
Cost Alerts,
Budgets, Advisor Recommendations
Export, And Cloud Connectors
Note that the Cloudyn link you can see there is simply
a link to the legacy Cloudyn Portal at Cloudyn.com.
The Cloudyn service will be
deprecated and eventually turned off
sometime next year. Let's look at Cost Management from a visiblity
perspective.
In this category the main features are Cost Analysis
which provides analysis capabilities
inside of the Azure Portal,
and, Export if you want to export the data for analysis,
or for other use, outside of Azure Cost Management itself.
The Cost Analysis blade provides you with
a quick visibility of your cloud
costs with four pre-defined views that can be further customized.
Note that the cost analysis is provided for the
specific scope selected,
so always use the “Scope Pill” at the top to ensure you are
looking at the correct scope of interest ,
this is where you define
what set of data you want to look at. Management and Finance for example
will typically look at broader scopes,
where as developers and App
teams will typically have a narrower
scope, drilling down right into subscriptions
and often looking at specific management
groups. The Chart by default displays the Accumulated spend
from the first of the current Month.
By default, this is the actual cost for both Azure
and the Marketplace deployments, but amortized
cost is also available as an option.
The Amortized cost view, spreads Azure Reservation
Costs, based on the discounted reservation consumption price,
over the Reservation Term. Note that if there is a budget selected for this
scope and you can see that in this case there are several,
then it is seen here as a dashed
red line. Under Budget spend is in bright
green and over budget spend is in bright
red. If the Forecast Chartview is on,
then the transparent green and red
represent forecast spend through
to the end of the period. The three Pie Charts at the bottom
show the cost totals of the current view
split by the various dimensions or
tags that are selected. These can be set
to those that are most important to you.
You can select from about 20 or so dimensions
or from any of your custom tags.
On the main chart, you can Group by any one of the
approximately 20 dimensions
or from any of the tags you have applied to your Azure resources.
For example, here I am grouping by Resource
Group Name Dimension. As I hover over the chart
The pop-up shows a totals of each Dimension member for the
day selected.
You can filter by any dimension member by clicking on that member's
color in any of the Pie Charts
below, for example, here or
on that Dimensions member's color in the main chart above
for example here. I'll just click on the
dark blue and you can see, I have now added a filter
for Resource Group name equals
Cost Mangagement Demo. You can then remove that filter by
clicking on the related X.
The Add Filter Pill is more powerful
in that it allows you to multiselect
dimension members. For example, I'll select
resource group name and now I can select multiple
members of the Resource
Group Name Dimenstion. You can also select
a Daily granularity, which shows Azure costs
per day. You can select a Column view
which in this case shows one column per day.
In this view the budget is reduced to a daily
budget, so it is easy to see spend
v budget on a day by day
basis. You can also select a Monthly granularity,
which in this case is not very interesting because
we are only looking at one month, so we can use the Time Pill
to select a different time period, for example 6 months.
Which makes this view a little more interesting. We can also select a granularity of “None”
which removes time from the “X” axis
and shows the cost for the selected time period
(in this case the last 6 months combined)
split by the Group By dimension.
Whenever you define a useful view as defined by
Date range selected, the Group
By Dimension, Filters and other settings,
you can save the view and create a library of these saved
reports. Simply give it a name, mark it as
private or not and hit save. These can later be retreived
by using the View Selector.
The Current view can also be exported as a PNG image or
as an Excel or CSV file.
You can also export this views data
to a storage blob from here.
The Share button gives you a shareable URL to this
specific view, for those with permission to see it.
All the data you can access through the Azure
Cost Management Cost Analysis user interface.
and more, is available through the Azure
Cost & Consumption APIs
and much of it is also available for
Power BI users through the Azure Consumption Insights
Power BI Connector, Power BI requires much
more work but allows you to
display the data in different ways and blend the data
with other data sources. Now let's look at Accountablity and Budgets
To support stakeholder accountability for cloud spend,
Azure Cost Management provides very granular
capabilities to dissect costs
so that each stakeholder can see their respective spends,
but not others and not more than they need to.
This is supported by Role Based Access controls, scopes,
dimensions, tags and soon, cost allocation and markups,
all of which will be discussed in more detail in other videos.
Budgets can be used to track spend against
budgeted funds and hold stakeholders accountable for their cloud spend.
Budgets can be set for any scope. For example, you can see here we have multiple
budgets set for the Trey Research R&D
Playground subscription scope. If we look at this monthly
budget for expample, we can see it set for $1,500.
per month resetting monthly.
If we then edit the budget, we can see that we
furthur filter that scope.
So for example, we can select any one of around
20 built in dimensions or by
custom tags. And for each one of those,
we can multi-select the
dimension members to be included.
We can do that on multiple
dimensions. We'll pick resource type again, we can multi-select
the members of that dimension.
Alerts can be set to be triggered when certain
Budget thresholds are met. Each alert can be associated with an Action Group
which gives enormous flexibility in defining actions
to be taken when alerts are triggered.
It would be easy for example to use Action Groups
to kick off an Automation Runbook to move an application to a smaller VM
if it goes overbudget by say 20%.
In addition to the actual cost
triggering budget alerts we also plan to add a feature where-by Forecast
spend would also trigger budget alerts.
This means that even early in the month
you could get alerts if you are on track to exceed
budget alert thresholds.
Note also that at the bottom here, recipients can be defined to receive emails when any of the Budget alerts
get triggered.
Whenever any Cost Alerts are triggered, they are
they are also listed on the Alerts page,
so you always have a summarized view
of all of the alerts.
Azure Cost Management provides cost optimization recommendations
by enhancing the Azure Advisor
service's cost recommendations.
If we select advisor recommendations, 4 categories of recommendations are provided
for the selected scope
with each one representing multiple instances of recommendations in that
Category. For example,
if we drill into “Right-size or shutdown
underutilized virtual machines”
we see 25 instances of this recommendation.
In each case we can view Usage
Patterns to look at CPU Utilization
as well as many other metrics for that VM.
If we decide to accept the recommendation
it presents a recommended SKU
and there's a selection so we can go ahead and resize it to that recommended size.
Amazon Web Services or AWS spend
can be included in Azure Cost Management.
You can separate and view Azure, AWS and Marketplace
charges when you group by “Publisher Type”
as you can see here in the pop up
box and in the bottom left
The Cloud Connectors
blade allows you to add AWS Linked Accounts
which then appear in Azure Management Groups,
potentially alongside Azure Subscriptions.
As organizations move to the cloud,
cost management is becoming more
and more important.
Azure Cost Management is designed to satisfy that need and ensure that Azure Customers
derive optimal value from the cloud, and, are able to deliver on the value,
reporting and governance that their stakeholders demand.
Thanks for listening, here are some links you may find helpful and please see our other videos in the Azure
Cost Management Channel on Your Tube,
using the link on this page. All the best
with Azure Cost Management.