One thing most organisations are fighting with is growing cloud and SaaS costs. It is easy for costs to grow and continue to grow, without careful supervision. Microsoft is here to help with Microsoft Cost Management, the cloud FinOps toolset to help you stay on top of your cloud costs.

In this article we introduce Microsoft Cost Management for cloud.

What is Microsoft Cost Management for cloud?

Microsoft Cost Management is a suite of FinOps tools that help organisations analyse, monitor, and optimise their Microsoft Cloud costs. Cost Management is available to anyone with access to a billing account, subscription, resource group, or management group.

You can access Cost Management within the billing and resource management experiences or separately as a standalone tool optimised for FinOps teams who manage cost across multiple scopes.

You can also automate and extend native capabilities or enrich your own tools and processes with cost to maximise organisational visibility and accountability with all stakeholders and realise your optimisation and efficiency goals faster.

A few examples of what you can do in Cost Management include:

  • Report on and analyse costs in the Azure portal, Microsoft 365 admin centre, or Power BI.
  • Monitor costs proactively with budget, anomaly, reservation utilisation, and scheduled alerts.
  • Enable tag inheritance and split shared costs with cost allocation rules.
  • Automate business processes or integrate cost into external tools by exporting data.

What data is included in Microsoft Cost Management

Within the Billing experience, you can manage all the products, subscriptions, and recurring purchases you use; review your credits and commitments; and view and pay your invoices. Invoices are available online or as PDFs and include all billed charges and any applicable taxes.

How much is Microsoft Cost Management?

Microsoft Cost Management is free in Azure and is automatically working within your Azure environment. Microsoft Cost Management does also work for AWS but applies a cost of 1% of the total cloud cost.

Rising Cloud costs and Cloud FinOps is a growing concern for most organisations. Azure offering a free service for their own cloud services and a low-cost option for AWS is a great step in the right direction to help you better manage your cloud costs and only pay for what you need. To find out more about Azure cost management download our guide here or visit our Azure services.