Surprise Azure Invoices Are a Choice: Budgets, Alerts, and Runbooks in Azure Cost Management

Variable billing is the part of reselling Azure that MSPs like least. The customer's usage moves, the invoice moves with it, and the first anyone hears about a spike is when the month closes. Azure Cost Management (ACM) exists to end that pattern, and access to it is one of the main reasons to move customers onto Azure Plan under Microsoft's new commerce experience. We covered the Azure Plan transition itself in our Azure Plan FAQ; this post is about what to do once you have ACM, from reading the views to wiring alerts into automation runbooks.

What does Azure Cost Management actually show you?#

ACM analyzes spend across all cloud resources under a subscription and layers cost optimization recommendations on top, powered by Microsoft's Advisor capabilities. The baseline view is accumulated spend across all utilities plus a forecast of what the final charges will look like at the end of the month.

From there you can drill into high-level meter categories (VMs, Storage, and so on), locations (East US, South Central US), and resource groups. Custom filters go further, and you can pull previous months for comparison. The pieces that turn ACM from a reporting tool into a proactive one are budgets and alerts, which we cover below.

Where to find it, and how scope works#

In the Azure Portal for a customer, search for Cost Management.

Select Cost Management in the left-hand navigation that appears. Note that you can change the subscription scope if the account holds more than one subscription.

Reading the cost analysis views#

Clicking Cost Analysis (Preview) lists every resource group spun up in the subscription, automatically sorted by cost. Expanding a resource group shows the individual utilities underneath it.

With preview features turned on, the Cost Analysis tab on the left offers pre-filtered views built for investigation.

A view like Daily Cost lays usage history out in a way that makes spikes easy to spot and trace to their source.

Advisor recommendations: limited, but worth a ticket#

The recommendations ACM surfaces are a limited set, but they can be genuinely insightful for trimming monthly cost. You can create a recommendation digest or alerts on a scheduled cadence whenever new recommendations appear. We suggest linking that feed to your PSA tool so a specific person owns acting on each new recommendation instead of the list quietly aging.

Budgets and alerts: the proactive layer#

Budgets are what trigger alerts. They can be scoped at a granular level with filters, specific resource groups for example, rather than always budgeting against the whole subscription.

Alerts fire at a percentage of budget, and you choose whether that percentage is measured against actual spend or forecasted spend.

Action groups: when an alert should do something#

Action groups are not mandatory for alerts, but they are where automation enters the picture. Natively you get SMS text, phone call, and Authenticator push in addition to plain email notification. In the actions section, you can call on Azure's automation infrastructure, runbooks, functions, and logic apps, to take a real action: automatically spinning resources down, updating PSA contracts, adjusting invoicing line items, and similar. The integration options across these tools give you a lot of flexibility.

Sharing spend with customers, and the markup catch#

Larger customers often want visibility into their Azure spend, and co-managed environments need it. ACM has native access controls that let you assign a specific role to users inside or outside the organization; in many environments a reader role is enough for the customer to see accumulated cost and forecast.

One caveat matters here. As of August 2021, Microsoft shows pay-as-you-go rates to anyone you grant access, which is the same as showing them MSRP. If you provide Azure with additional markup, there is no way to factor that into the customer's view. Decide whether that transparency works for your pricing model before handing out access.

Where to start#

Set up budgets and alerts across your customers first, without any action groups attached. Run that way long enough to learn which task you actually perform every time an alert lands. Once the pattern is obvious, automate it with an action group. Cost optimization and month-over-month trend visibility are the payoff, and they compound across every customer subscription you manage.