Azure Cost Management is a powerful suite of tools that helps you gain visibility into your cloud spending, identify cost savings opportunities, and optimize your cloud infrastructure. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the key reporting components of Azure Cost Management and how to leverage them to make informed decisions about your cloud investments.

Cost Analysis: Visualize and Analyze Your Costs

Cost analysis should be your first stop when it comes to understanding your cloud spending. The cost analysis feature in the Azure portal allows you to:

  • Visualize and analyze your organizational costs
  • Share cost views with others using custom alerts
  • View aggregated costs by organization to understand where costs occur over time and identify spending trends
  • View accumulated costs over time to estimate monthly, quarterly, or even yearly cost trends against a budget
  • Create budgets to provide adherence to financial constraints
  • Use budgets to view daily or monthly costs and help isolate spending irregularities

To access cost analysis, sign in to the Azure portal, select the Home menu, scroll down under Tools, and choose Cost Management. Then, select a scope (resource group, subscription, management group, or billing account) and click on Cost analysis in the left menu.

Power BI: Unlock Advanced Reporting and Analytics

While cost analysis provides a rich, interactive experience for analyzing your costs, there may be times when you need to build more extensive dashboards and complex reports or combine cost data with your internal data. The Cost Management template app for Power BI is a great way to get started with advanced cost reporting and analytics.

The Power BI template app allows you to:

  • Visualize your Azure and AWS costs in comprehensive reports
  • Combine cost data with other internal datasets for deeper insights
  • Customize and extend the reports to meet your organization’s specific needs

To get started, see the Analyze Azure costs with the Power BI App article.

Cost Details and Exports: Integrating Cost Data with Other Systems

If you need to automate business processes or integrate cost data with other systems, you can export your raw cost data to a storage account. Scheduled exports allow you to automatically publish your cost data to a storage account on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, making it easy to build first-class cost data integration.

For more fine-grained control over your data requests, the Cost Details API offers flexibility to pull raw cost data in the format you need. This can be helpful for building custom reporting solutions or integrating cost data with your internal systems.

To learn more about creating and managing exported data, check out the Create and manage exported data tutorial. For information on the Cost Details API, see the Cost Details API documentation.

Invoices and Credits: Understanding Your Billed Charges

While cost analysis is great for reviewing estimated, unbilled charges and tracking historical cost trends, it may not show your total billed amount due to credits, taxes, and other refunds and charges not available in Cost Management. To get a complete picture of your billed charges, you can:

  • Review your projected bill at the end of the month by starting in cost analysis to understand your forecasted costs, then checking any available credit or prepaid commitment balance from the Credits or Payment methods sections.
  • Review your final billed charges after the invoice is available in the Invoices section for your billing account or billing profile.

For more information on viewing and downloading your Azure invoice, see the View and download your Microsoft Azure invoice article. To learn about tracking your Microsoft Customer Agreement Azure credit balance, check out the Track Microsoft Customer Agreement Azure credit balance guide.

Mobile Monitoring with the Azure App

The Microsoft Azure mobile app provides a convenient way to monitor the status of your Azure resources and track your cloud spending from your mobile device. With the app, you can:

  • Keep track of the status of your Azure resources, such as virtual machines (VMs) and web apps
  • Receive alerts about important issues in your environment
  • View your current cost, last month’s cost, forecasted cost, and budget usage for your subscriptions and resource groups

The Azure app is available for iOS and Android.

By leveraging the rich reporting capabilities of Azure Cost Management, you can gain valuable insights into your cloud spending, identify areas for optimization, and make informed decisions to maximize the return on your cloud investments. Stay tuned for future enhancements and updates to this powerful suite of tools.

Source: Get started with Cost Management reporting - Azure