Effectively managing and monitoring costs is a crucial aspect of ensuring the long-term success and sustainability of your Microsoft Sentinel deployment. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the various tools and techniques available to help you gain visibility into your spending, set budgets, and proactively control costs.

Understanding Your Costs

As you use Azure resources with Microsoft Sentinel, you will inevitably incur costs. These costs can vary based on factors like time intervals (seconds, minutes, hours, days) and usage units (bytes, megabytes). It’s important to regularly review and analyze these costs to identify areas where you can optimize and reduce your spending.

The Azure portal’s Cost Management + Billing hub provides a powerful tool for this purpose. By navigating to the Cost Analysis section, you can view your Microsoft Sentinel costs in detailed graphs and tables, broken down by timeframes, budgets, and forecasts. This allows you to quickly identify spending trends, detect areas of overspending, and ensure you stay within any established budgets.

Leveraging Cost Management Features

Azure Cost Management offers several features to help you proactively manage and control your costs:

Budgets and Alerts

You can create budgets at the subscription or resource group level, and set up alerts to notify you when spending exceeds predefined thresholds. This allows you to stay on top of your costs and quickly address any potential overspending.

Filters and Scoping

When creating budgets, you can apply filters to target specific resources or services, such as Microsoft Sentinel. This granular approach helps you ensure that you don’t inadvertently create new resources that could drive up your costs.

Cost Analysis and Reporting

The Cost Analysis feature in the Azure portal provides a comprehensive view of your usage and costs, allowing you to identify trends, spot anomalies, and export data for further analysis.

Optimizing Costs with Kusto Queries

Microsoft Sentinel’s powerful Kusto query language can be leveraged to gain deeper insights into your data ingestion volumes and associated costs. Here are some sample queries you can use:

  1. Show data ingestion volume by solution:
Usage
| where StartTime >= startofday(ago(31d)) and EndTime < startofday(now())
| where IsBillable == true
| summarize BillableDataGB = sum(Quantity) / 1000. by bin(StartTime, 1d), Solution
| extend Solution = iif(Solution == "SecurityInsights