Understanding your cloud consumption bill just got a whole lot easier
"I would move to the cloud but how do I explain the bill to my board?
How can I know who spend what?
With monthly bills on yearly budgets, won't this mess up my whole planning?
I don't have control over what each user is doing and billing each department for their usage can be an impossible task."
These are pain-points we hear all day from customers.
Cost management has always been a hassle for many organizations when it comes to cloud consumption. Recently, Microsoft added Azure Cost Management APIs that provide critical cost management features like budgets and data APIs to enable granular analysis of your cloud spending. This options offer the client visibility and control over how much they consume on monthly basis as an organization, per department, even going as granular as seeing how much a specific application uses. These key features will help the clients understand their invoice and adequately charge internally their different departments.
On top of this, when situations arise where customers tend to have overreaches and they consume more than initially expected, they would know exactly which department exceeded their target and can plan accordingly for the future. Combined with other Azure APIs like price sheet, summaries, reservation information etc that allow other departments other than IT to get great value out of using Azure.
Microsoft Azure supports a cost metric and a usage metric. Based on whichever metric you chose, you can get notified when you would be hitting a particular threshold. Right now, Azure offers you the chance to choose what actions you want to set up when you do hit those consumption thresholds, thus setting up the right policies in place for your organization.
The cool thing about Azure is that Microsoft does not want to be in the business of prescribing what actions clients should take when they hit a particular consumption threshold, especially because every business is different and every business has different needs that constantly change. This is why is great that have the ability to control and set up the tone for various scenarios.
Here are all the details about how one can manage their budget in Azure:
You can create a budget and set it up based on cost or based on usage, then you can go more granular and set it up at a subscription level, resource group, combination of resource groups, account department on enrollment. This allows you so much flexibility when setting up the right budget for your organization. Once you set up your notification thresholds, you can find out when you’re getting close to 100% and you can get approval for going above 100%. This gives budget flexibility and control over how much it is spent on consumption and the best part is it gives visibility to other departments on who spend what.
I hope you found value in this article and as always, I welcome your thoughts in the comments.