Managing costs with alerts, budgets and Azure Advisor recommendations

Managing cost, alerts, budgets, and Azure Advisor recommendations is essential for maintaining financial control and optimising the performance of your Azure resources.

Some of the Azure Cost Management and Billing features we need to be aware of nclude:

Cost Management

Azure Cost Management presents to you a set of tools within the Azure portal to keep track and manage spending. It gives you insight in the cost and usage patterns, enable you to predict future cost and optimise cloud expenditure.

Cost analysis provides detailed reports on your spending across various services, resource groups and subscriptions. You can filter, group and visualise cost data to gain insights on spending.

Cost allocation is where you allocate cost to different departments. projects or teams using resource tags. Which makes for easy attribution of spending and budget management across the organisation.

Cost saving recommendation are suggestions for cost savings such as resizing or shutting down underutilised resources, purchasing reserved instances or moving workloads to a lower-cost regions. 

Alerts

You can set up budgets for your subscription or resource group. Budgets are predefined spending thresholds that help you manage costs. With budgets in place, you can now create budget alerts to notify you via email or other messaging channels when spending gets to certain percentage of the budget, so you can take steps to control spending before it exceeds your allocated budget.

Besides budget alerts, you can set up cost threshold alerts to notify you when your spending reaches a specific amount, regardless of whether you have set a formal budget.

Alerts can be configured for specific resources or services allowing you to monitor cost for a particular resource or service.

Budgets

Budgets help you keep track of spending against specified thresholds. You can automate actions like scaling down a resource, stop non-essential services based on budget alerts, when a budget threshold is reached.

It is a good practice to review budgets from time to time, to ensure they remain aligned with your organisation's goals. It is expected that your usage patterns  will evolve over time, hence the need to review and make changes when necessary to your budgets.

Historical Trends feature can be used to refine budgeting process to improve on its accuracy over time.

Azure Advisor Recommendations

Azure Advisor is a free service that provides personalised best practices recommendations for optimising your Azure environment. These recommendations are based on your actual usage and configuration.

These recommendation are around reducing cost, improving performance, security and reliability. Advisor Recommendations also include details on potential impact of a recommendation, implementation steps and estimated cost savings. To further making things more interesting, there are one-click actions to implement the advice directly from the portal, making it easy to optimise your environment.