Microsoft Azure – Using Cost Management in Azure Portal

In this article we will learn how to use cost management to understand your spending in the cloud, so you can do more with less. Cost management is available from any subscription or resource group within the portal.

Since starting on the Azure home, the first thing that you want to do is click on the scope pill so that you can verify that you are looking at the scope that you are interested in. You can see all your billing accounts and subscriptions here.

 You can just go to pick this cost management research subscription.   Within cost analysis, you can see a summary of what you have spent for the month, as well as costs broken down by service, location, and resource group. 

Start by looking at the daily run rate. Looks like typical daily usage changes. You are going to group by resource group to see if there are any apps that you have in your environment that are causing that. Again, if you see some fluctuations here within this one resource group, but you know  that’s something that’s typical for this specific app, so not too concerned with that. Now, you can switch to a table view to then view more detail of this. 

But instead of doing that, what you can actually do is going to switch to the cost by resource view. And within the cost by resource view, you can see a list of all the resources within your subscription. And they are sorted by cost, which allows you to see what are the resources that are costing the most money within the subscription. 

So,  you can use cost analysis within the portal to see how much you’re spending for the month, how you’re trending against your budget, and how to dig into the individual resources to see which resources are costing the most money.