Azure Cost Management and Billing updates – March 2022

Whether you're a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you're spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management and Billing comes in.

We're always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Azure Cost Management and Billing can help you better understand where you're accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

• Manage your Enterprise Agreement billing account in the Azure portal
• What's new in Cost Management Labs
• New ways to save money with Azure
• Documentation updates
• Join the Azure Cost Management and Billing team

Let's dig into the details.

 

Manage your Enterprise Agreement billing account in the Azure portal

If you manage an Enterprise Agreement (EA) billing account, you’re familiar with the EA portal where you can manage the account hierarchy, view credit balance, and view cost for each department, account, and subscription. This has been a great foundation, but did you know there are even more tools that can help you better monitor, manage, and optimize costs within the Azure portal?

When it comes to managing your billing account (enrollment), you have all the same EA tools available from Cost Management and Billing in the Azure portal:

• Seamlessly create and manage the enrollment hierarchy.
• Manage access to departments, accounts, and subscriptions.
• View properties and manage policies, like the ability to view charges and purchase reservations.
• View notification contacts for enrollment emails.

Looking beyond account management, you’ll start to see new tools to help you monitor and manage costs:

• View and track Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) balance.
• View and download invoices.
• View and download consolidated usage and charges, including options for amortized reservation charges.
• Analyze and drill into your costs in the portal or schedule automated exports.
• Split shared costs to drive more visibility and accountability throughout the organization with cost allocation.
• Configure budgets to get alerted before costs exceed predefined thresholds.

With these updates, managing your EA billing account from the Azure portal is now generally available for direct EA enrollments. Learn more and let us know what you’d like to see next.

 

What's new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what's coming in Azure Cost Management and can engage directly with us to share feedback and help us better understand how you use the service, so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Cost Management Labs:

• Update: Total cost in the cost analysis preview—now available in the public portal
  See your total cost at the top of the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview or by using the cost analysis preview in Cost Management Labs.
• New: Access preview views from classic cost analysis
  Get one-click access to the new preview views from classic cost analysis in the View menu. You can see this in classic cost analysis in Cost Management Labs.
• New: Anomaly detection alerts
  Subscribe to automatic email alerts when a new anomaly has been detected. Anomaly detection is only available for subscriptions in the cost analysis preview. You can opt into this preview using Try Preview and then configure anomaly alerts from the Alerts page.
• Grouping SQL databases and elastic pools
  Get an at-a-glance view of your total SQL costs by grouping SQL databases and elastic pools under their parent server in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
• Average cost in the cost analysis preview
  See your average daily cost at the top of the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
• Charts in the cost analysis preview
  View your daily or monthly cost over time in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
• Budgets in the cost analysis preview
  Quickly create and edit budgets directly from the cost analysis preview. If you don’t have a budget yet, you’ll see a suggested budget based on your forecast. You can opt in using Try Preview.
• View cost for your resources
  The cost for your resources is one click away from the resource overview in the preview portal. Just click View cost to quickly jump to the cost of that particular resource.
• Change scope from the menu
  Change scope from the menu for quicker navigation. You can opt in using Try Preview.

Of course, that's not all. Every change in Azure Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it's in the full Azure portal. We're eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you'd like to see next. What are you waiting for? Try Cost Management Labs today.

 

New ways to save money with Azure

Lots of cost optimization improvements over the last month! Here are new and updated offers you might be interested in:

• General availability: Automatically delete a VM and its associated resources simultaneously.
• Generally available: Virtual Machine level disk bursting supports M-series, Msv2-series Medium Memory, and Mdsv2-series Medium Memory VM families.
• General availability: Best practices assessment for SQL virtual machines.
• General availability: Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server now available in US Gov Virginia and China East 2 and China North 2.
• General availability: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server now available in US Gov Virginia and US Gov Arizona.
• General availability: Azure NetApp Files is now available in Australia Central 2 with support for cross-region replication.
• Preview: On-demand capacity reservations for Azure Site Recovery.
• Preview: Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux Bring Your Own Subscription.
• Preview: SKU recommendation in Azure SQL Migration extension for Azure Data Studio.

 

Documentation updates

Here are a few documentation updates you might be interested in:

• Learn about built-in views available in cost analysis.
• Documented common questions about the UsageDetails API.
• Increased the subscription limit from 2000 to 5000 subscriptions per EA enrollment account.
• Updated subscription transfer articles for newly supported transfer scenarios, including reservations getting automatically transferred.

Want to keep an eye on all of the documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing documentation change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request.

 

Join the Azure Cost Management and Billing team

Are you excited about helping customers and partners better manage and optimize costs? We're looking for passionate, dedicated, and exceptional people to help build best in class cloud platforms and experiences to enable exactly that. If you have experience with big data infrastructure, reliable and scalable APIs, or rich and engaging user experiences, you'll find no better challenge than serving every Microsoft customer and partner in one of the most critical areas for driving cloud success.

Watch the video below to learn more about the Azure Cost Management and Billing team:

Join our team.

What's next?

These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don't forget to check out the previous Azure Cost Management and Billing updates. We're always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow @AzureCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. You can also share ideas and vote up others in the Cost Management feedback forum or join the research panel to participate in a future study and help shape the future of Azure Cost Management and Billing.

We know these are trying times for everyone. Best wishes from the Azure Cost Management and Billing team. Stay safe and stay healthy.

Source: Azure Blog Feed