A Complete Guide to Azure Cost Management
As companies shift to the cloud, managing the costs is as important as using the cloud to its fullest. Azure is one of the most popular cloud platforms, and it offers a lot of benefits such as scalability and flexibility; however, if you do not manage the costs associated with the cloud, you are likely to spend a lot of money. This is where Azure Cost Management comes in to help you get the most out of your cloud spending and how to use the money you spend on cloud services wisely. What is Azure Cost Management? Azure Cost Management is a set of tools available within the Azure platform that helps organizations in managing the costs of their cloud resources, optimizing their usage and sticking to the budget. It is integrated with Azure services to help in identifying waste and ways of getting the most out of the investment. Key Features of Azure Cost Management Cost Analysis Azure Cost Analysis gives you a clear view of your expenditure and helps you identify where your money is going. You are also able to customize your views to the resources, subscriptions, services or the regions to notice the changes and exceptions. Budgets Establish your funds with budgets to ensure that you do not spend more than you had intended to on Azure. Azure allows you to create budgets for certain subscriptions, resource groups or even services and it will send you notifications when you are about to reach or even go beyond your limits. This is a proactive way that prevents you from incurring exceeding charges. Cost Allocation with Tags Azure supports the concept of tagging, which means that you can associate keys (such as department, project, or environment) with resources. These tags are useful in helping assign the costs to the right teams or objects for example departments or projects. Suggestions for Enhancement Azure Cost Management is integrated with Azure Advisor to offer suggestions that include downsizing underutilized VMs, purchasing reserved instances, or identifying inactive resources. Integration with Power BI For more sophisticated reporting, Azure Cost Management is integrated with Power BI, which allows you to design your own reports and dashboards that meet your companyâs requirements. Multi Cloud Support Azure Cost Management is not only limited to Azure, it also includes AWS thereby enabling organizations with a multi-cloud strategy to manage the costs of all the clouds from one platform. Tips for the Effective Implementation of Azure Cost Management: To enhance the usage of Azure Cost Management, implement the following tips: Implement Cost Governance Establish roles and responsibilities to ensure that spending is appropriate. Use Azure Policy to set policies such as restricting the creation of high-cost resources in some subscriptions. Monitor Spending Regularly Set up some alerts and review the spending reports frequently. This way you can notice any irregularities and deal with them before they become a problem. Use Reserved Instances and Savings Plans For the workloads with the certain schedule, it is recommended to buy Azure Reserved Instances or Azure Savings Plans that provide a significant price reduction compared to the pay as you go pricing. Optimize Resource Usage Shut down or remove inactive resources, shrink VMs to the required size, and use scaling to vary the resources according to the need. Leverage Spot VMs For less critical or lightweight tasks that can tolerate some level of downtime, Azure Spot VMs can be used to reduce the overall cloud spending. Tag and Organize Resources It is important to have a good tagging practice in place to increase the cost visibility. Some of the tags could be Project: AI Research, Department: Marketing and so on that help in identifying the costs and managing the spend against the right projects and departments. Real World Benefits of Azure Cost Management Example 1: Optimization for Reducing Costs A SaaS company was able to decrease its cloud spending by 30% by identifying dormant resources and downsizing over provisioned VMs with the help of Azure Cost Management suggestions. Example 2: Improved Budgetary Control An enterprise IT department did not spend more than the budget because it established subscription-level budgets and received notifications when the consumption was close to the limits. Example 3: Multi Cloud Efficiency A global company combined the tracking of its cloud expenses across Azure and AWS using Azure Cost Management and was able to generate one unified report for all the clouds, which in turn helped it make better financial decisions. The Future of Cost Management in Azure As cloud environments become more sophisticated, cost management tools will keep on developing. Some of the other features that are expected to be incorporated in the future include the use of artificial intelligence in the generation of insights, prediction, and better integration with DevOps processes. Thus, using Azure Cost Management, organizations can graduate from the reactive spending control to the proactive cost optimization and thus make sure that their cloud journey is not only creative but also economic. Sum up Azure Cost Management is a valuable tool for anyone seeking to manage, minimize, and explain cloud expenditure. Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, these tools help you make decisions based on data, increase your ROI, and gain financial visibility in the cloud. Get started with Azure Cost Management today, and discover how to maximize your cloud spend while maintaining a healthy budget.
Log Analytics Agent-based Azure Management Services: Shut down starting 28 February 2025
Overview The legacy Log Analytics (LA) agent, which has played a critical role in transferring data logs for software and applications to Azure, was deprecated on August 31, 2024. Subsequently, all Azure services and solutions relying on the Log Analytics agent for data collection are also being phased out. This transition ensures a seamless shift to more robust replacement products, enhancing continuity, security, and performance for customers' IT estates. Two of the Azure Automation solutions provided management of machines using the LA agent namely, Azure Automation Update Management for streamline software update deployment & Azure Change Tracking & Inventory for tracking changes and inventory for in-guest environments. These agent-based services were also deprecated on 31 st August 2024. Over the last 6 months, these solutions were maintained, giving customers time to move their management processes to the replacement products. In order to ensure a security posture of the customer environments, these LA agent-based solutions will be completely shut down starting 28 th February 2025. You may encounter your existing patching jobs fail and staleness in the changes data in the log analytics workspace after this date. Following captures further details on the impact to operations for the machines that continue to be on these solutions and provides additional guidance. What will change after 28 th February 2025? a) You will not be able to access both Azure Automation Update Management & Azure Change Tracking & Inventory enabled with the LA agent from the Azure Portal. b) For Azure Automation Update Management, no new periodic assessments or patching data corresponding to configured machines will be populated. c) For Change Tracking & Inventory with LA agent, no new changes or inventory logs will be captured. Note: Historical data for the last 30 days will continue to be available in LA workspace and can be directly queried from the LA tables LA workspace table Purpose ConfigurationData To obtain inventory logs for auditing and compliance needs ConfigurationChange To obtain logs corresponding to the changes made in customer environment Update To query periodic assessments and patched updates data for pending updates view What next? If you have any machines configured with legacy version of above-mentioned services, please use one of the following available methods to migrate to replacements products â Product Service Product Migration Guidance Azure Change Tracking & Inventory with LA agent a) Migrate to Azure Monitoring Agent (AMA) version of Change Tracking & Inventory â Using Azure Portal Using PowerShell b) If you have enabled File Integrity monitoring (FIM) with LA agent & managing it via Change Tracking & Inventory experience, here are the available options to migrate to - Move to Change Tracking & Inventory with AMAfor enhanced insights for data types including Files, Registry Keys, Software, Windows Services, Linux Daemons, File content changes. Move to FIM with MDE (part of Defender for Servers Plan 2) Azure Automation Update Management Migrate to Azure Update Manager (Does not rely on AMA) Using Azure Portal Using Runbook scripts Additionally, you can refer to these instructions to disable LA agent from your environment. Please feel free to reach out to us on aumpm@microsoft.com for any queries or feedback.Now Open Source: nxtools, managing Linux IaC just got simpler using Automanage machine configuration
We are "nxcited" to announce the release of nxtools, an opensource collection of class-based DSC resources for commonly used Linux / Unix modules and built-in Machine Configuration packages for customers. Azure Automanage Machine Configuration (previously known as Azure Policy Guest Configuration) enables configuration as code allowing you to audit and configure OS, app, and workload level settings at scale, both for machines running in Azure and hybrid Azure Arc-enabled servers.Exciting News: AMBA Portal Accelerator is now Generally Available!
We are thrilled to announce that the Azure Monitor Baseline Alerts-Azure Landing Zones (AMBA-ALZ) Portal Accelerator has officially reached General Availability (GA). This achievement is a big step forward in our goal to make onboarding and simplify monitoring your Azure environment regardless of whether or not you are fully aligned to Azure Landing Zones. Screenshot of Azure Landing Zone portal Accelerator What is the AMBA Portal Accelerator? As we introduced AMBA into the ALZ portal experience (not to be confused with this accelerator!) and with the increased flexibility AMBA-ALZ provided for the preferred action notification types, this introduced a need to provide a post ALZ-AMBA Portal to accommodate those notification types that required an existing resource (Azure Function, Event Hub, and Logic App) and in the case of deploying ALZ possibly for the first time these resources may not be present. The AMBA-ALZ Portal Accelerator is designed to simplify the process of setting up baseline alerts, helping you boost your observability maturity in your Azure environment with minimal effort or expertise. You can set up alerts faster and with more confidence. You'll get timely notifications about critical metrics and log anomalies that might signal potential issues with your Azure workloads. What Scenarios Does The Accelerator Help Address? There are a few scenarios as to where the Accelerator can help meet you where you are in your journey: You are an existing Azure customer and looking to mature your observability posture (and at the same time with low effort move one step closer to being aligned to Azure Landing Zones You have an existing Azure Landing Zones implementation prior to AMBA being released and are looking to update your environment to include AMBA-ALZ You may be new to Azure and deploying Azure Landing Zones (the recommended way to onboard to Azure) and wanting to use Azure Function, Event Hub, and Logic App Notification Types Getting Started To begin using the AMBA-ALZ Portal Accelerator, navigate to https://aka.ms/amba/alz/portal or click the "Deploy to Azure" button on the documentation page. Detailed deployment instructions and further guidance are available to help you get started quickly and efficiently. If you have any further feedback please use the following links: đŹ - Feedback GitHub Issues: https://aka.ms/amba/issues đŹ - Feedback survey: https://aka.ms/ambaSurveyAzure Change Tracking & Inventory: Simplified onboarding to manage in-guest changes on Azure Arc VMs
Explore new Azure native few clicks onboarding experience for Change Tracking & Inventory on Azure Arc servers, streamlining in-guest change management operations, while strengthening your adaptive cloud strategy.Azure Automation is revising Service and Subscription Limits
Starting 7 th January 2025, Azure Automation will be revising its Service and Subscription limits to ensure fair distribution of cloud resources across all customers. This change is another step towards improving the reliability and performance of the service while optimizing resource utilization. Since the resource requirements vary across organizations and evolve over time, we are empowering customers to configure their quotas based on actual usage. Revised limits The current Service and Subscription limits for Azure Automation can be found here. To start with, we are revising the limits for two resources: Maximum number of Automation accounts in a subscription in a region. Maximum number of concurrent running jobs at the same instance of time per Automation account You will get an error message when you exceed the limits mentioned below: Resource Limit Notes Maximum number of Automation accounts in a subscription in a region 10 2 1 Enterprise and CSP subscriptions would be able to create accounts in any of the regions supported by the service. Pay-as-you-go, Sponsored, MSDN, MPN, Azure Pass subscriptions can create Automation accounts in any of the regions supported by the service. Free trial, Azure for Student, Azure in Open subscriptions can create only one Automation account per region per subscription. Allowed list of regions: EastUS, EastUS2, WestUS, NorthEurope, SoutheastAsia, and JapanWest2 Maximum number of concurrent running jobs at the same instance of time per Automation account per region 50 10 5 Enterprise and CSP subscriptions Pay-as-you-go, Sponsored, MSDN, MPN, Azure Pass subscriptions Free trial, Azure for Student, Azure in Open subscriptions Frequently asked questions When will the new limits come into effect? New limits would be effective starting 7 th January 2025 across all commercial regions. Your patience during the transition period is appreciated. How do I check my current resource usage? You will be able to check your usage of Automation accounts and concurrently running jobs through Quotas service on Azure portal or while creating a support request under the category âService and Subscription limits (Quotas)â. Quotas service on Azure portal will be enabled once deployment starts in January 2025. My current usage is more than the revised limits. What should I do? Rest assured that your current usage of both resources - Automation accounts and concurrent running jobs - will be honored and will not be impacted. For example, consider you are an Enterprise customer. Your new limit is 10 Automation accounts and current usage is 12 accounts. Even though your usage is higher than the new limit, your usage of 12 accounts would be honored and then considered as your new limit. When you exceed the new limit of 12 accounts, you would get an error. I need more resources than my current limits. What should I do? You will get complete control to request for quota increase and decrease based on your changing business requirements. Once the changes are deployed in January 2025, you will be able to check your current usage, current limit and request for quota changes by creating a support request under the category âService and Subscription limits (Quotas)â for âAzure Automationâ. Detailed steps to request for quota changes would be shared once deployment starts in January 2025. Please feel free to reach out to askazureautomation@microsoft.com for any questions or feedback.
Ensure failover capacity at optimal cost with Azure Site Recovery
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) is becoming increasingly crucial as the data estates of customers are growing. Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is the Virtual Machine (VM) Disaster Recovery (DR) service provided by Azure and is a key component of several customers' BCDR strategies. ASR enables the replication of workloads from a primary location to a secondary location. In the event of an outage at the primary site, workloads can be accessed from the secondary location by failing over. Once the primary location is operational again, it is possible to fail back to it. In this article, we address a common question: How can you improve the chances of capacity availability for completing failovers at optimal costs? When planning the Disaster Recovery strategy, itâs essential to understand that the cloud ecosystem operates on a shared responsibility model between customers and cloud providers. If compute capacity is unavailable in the DR region due to some reasons, failovers may fail with allocation issues. Therefore, it is recommended to identify the workloads that require high SLA for capacity availability in the DR location, based on business criticality or compliance requirements. For these critical workloads, you are recommended to opt-in for On-Demand Capacity Reservations when using Azure Site Recovery. When you configure capacity reservation group with ASR, Capacity Reservation SLA gets added for failovers in DR location. Please keep in mind that capacity reservation has cost implications. How can cost be optimized for capacity reservations? Capacity Reservations are priced at the same rate as the underlying VM size. To optimize cost when using Capacity Reservation along with ASR, you can also use Azure VM Reserved Instances or Azure Savings plan for compute. This is because capacity reservations are eligible for Savings Plan and Reserved Instances term commitments discounts. Azure Reserved Instances or Azure Savings Plan do not provide any capacity SLA but provide discounted rates for commitments whereas Capacity Reservation provides the capacity SLA. Keep in mind that reserved instances or savings plan only cover the compute cost of VMs; additional costs (like OS license cost, software licenses, etc.) will still apply. Azure Reserved Instances allows you to commit to one-year or three-year term of compute capacity by paying up-front or monthly at a discounted rate compared to pay-as-you-go rates, enabling customers to save up to 72% for the VM cost. Azure Savings Plan allows you to reduce compute usage costs by up to 65% compared to pay-as-you-go rates by making an hourly spend commitment across all in-scope instances. Depending on your workloads pattern and needs, you can decide between a savings plan and a reservation. If you have workloads that run continuously and are stable, Azure Reserved Instance may be the preferable option. If you have workloads that are dynamic and evolving, Azure Savings Plan may be a preferable option. If you are using Azure Reserved Instances for the ASR protected workload configured for regional protection, note that the targeted region would not be covered by the Reserved Instance pricing that was being applied in the source region. The target region would require its own Azure Reserved Instance commitment to cover the additional VMs in the failed over region. Since failed over workloads are typically short term and tend to be failed back to the original source, you will need to determine if additional Reserved Instance commitments make sense for your situation. If you are using Azure Savings plan, ensure ASR failed over VMs are within scope of the savings plan. With Azure savings plan, hourly usage charges incurred from savings plan-eligible resources, which are within the benefit scope of the savings plan, are discounted and applied to your hourly commitment until the hourly commitment is reached. Illustration Let us take an example of an Azure Reserved Instance: Source location of VMs: East US2 Target location: West US2 2 VMs: each of D4s_v5 (4 vCPU, 16 GiB RAM), one running Windows utilizing Azure Hybrid Benefit and the other Linux. Both these VMs have ASR configured with the source VM size configured for ASR target as well. Target resource group named: asr-westus2-rg You have also associated a Capacity Reservation Group while configuring ASR on each of above VMs. This associated capacity reservation group has two (2) VM instances of size D4s_v5. By default, capacity reservation will utilize the pay-as-you-go pricing of the D4s_v5 VM. The cost for this capacity reservation will be for two D4s_v5 VMs in West US2 per month (2*140.16 = USD 280.32). So irrespective of whether you have failed over to West US2 or not, you will keep paying USD 280.32 per month for capacity reservation. Now, you purchase reserved instance for 2 VMs of size D4s_v5 in West US2 for a commitment term of 3 years with the scope as single resource group (asr-westus2-rg) which is same resource group used as target resource group for ASR. The price for reserved instance for 3-year term is (2*51.8592 = 103.7184) USD 103.7184 per month, thus having ~63% of cost savings. This reserved instance applies to your capacity reservation, and you are paying USD ~104 per month effectively. Please note that prices in the illustration are from Pricing - Windows Virtual Machines | Microsoft Azure as on 08-Nov-2024. For Windows, Azure Hybrid Benefits (AHB) were also applied while making the above calculations. Prices are estimates only and are not intended as actual price quotes. Actual prices may vary. nshot of price from Azure Pricing Page for Windows OS with AHB applied Conclusion Using Capacity Reservation along with Reserved Instances or Savings plan together can provide high SLAs for capacity availability at discounted rates. One thing to note before we conclude this article is that you can use Azure Site Recovery to perform global disaster recovery to replicate VM between any two regions if Azure Site Recovery supports them. These 2 regions can be non-paired regions as well. Please note: Scope of this article is disaster recovery for Azure VMs.
