Top 10 reasons you should not use Azure Cost Management
Managing expenses in Azure seems straightforward, but complexity rises as you scale. At first glance, Azure Cost Management offers various reports and charts. However, when dealing with numerous subscriptions, thousands of resources, and multiple business units, its limitations become evident.
Below are the ten common limitations of Azure Cost Management, illustrated with real-world examples, and how Turbo360 effectively addresses each issue.
1. Limited Visibility into Business Costs
Scenario:
Your finance department inquires, “What were the costs for the marketing analytics project last quarter?” Azure Cost Management only provides a lump sum at the subscription level, leaving you in the dark.
Issue with Azure: There is inadequate visibility at the project or business-unit level.
Turbo360 Solution:
Turbo360’s Cost Analyzer automatically categorises Azure expenditures into structured hierarchies of business units, projects, and cost centres. Additionally, you can establish custom access levels so each department can only see their own expenditures.
2. Inaccurate Reservation Utilisation
Scenario:
Your IT team invests in reserved instances for VMs anticipating substantial savings. Three months later, you discover that many were assigned to the wrong region, with some going entirely unused. Azure Cost Management failed to notify you.
Issue with Azure: There’s insufficient insight into reservation usage.
Turbo360 Solution:
Turbo360’s Reservations module provides comprehensive utilisation reports that highlight idle, underutilised, or incorrectly applied reservations. Turbo360 can promptly alert your team about unused reservations, enabling swift action to reallocate resources and minimise waste. It actively monitors for new reservation opportunities and offers actionable insights to optimise savings.
3. Ongoing Waste from Overlooked Resources
Scenario:
A developer initiated a test VM six months ago and forgot to turn it off. Now, it continues to run unnoticed, leading to unexpected costs. Azure Cost Management flags the bill but doesn’t reveal inactive resources.
Issue with Azure: Persistent waste from unnoticed idle resources is challenging to identify.
Turbo360 Solution:
Turbo360’s Other Recommendations feature instantly identifies idle VMs. It sends alerts via Teams, Slack, or email before the waste accumulates, saving you significant costs. This applies not just to VMs but over 25 resource types, including disks, Virtual Networks, public IPs, and beyond, providing a holistic view of potential waste.
4. Absence of Intelligent Right-Sizing
Scenario:
Your e-commerce application utilises D-series VMs. During peak season, resources were over-provisioned as a precaution. Now, in the off-peak season, you find yourself still paying for those excess resources. Azure can mistakenly signal low CPU usage where memory is high and suggest inappropriate downgrading.
Issue with Azure: No intelligent resizing suggestions and incorrect alerts.
Turbo360 Solution:
Turbo360 evaluates historical usage data and identifies that those D-series VMs rarely utilise over 30 percent CPU. It recommends downgrading to a more economical SKU without compromising performance. Turbo360 also allows you to set custom thresholds for CPU, memory, or disk usage, ensuring accurate insights tailored to your workload.
5. Lack of Transparency for Finance Teams
Scenario:
The CFO requests a detailed breakdown of cloud expenses for the board meeting, asking, “What did engineering spend compared to customer support this month?” Meanwhile, IT scrambles to export CSV files, still unable to provide a clear answer.
Issue with Azure: Finance teams only receive consolidated invoices, lacking detailed breakdowns.
Turbo360 Solution:
Turbo360 produces comprehensive financial reports that delineate expenditure by service, project, department, or business unit. Finance leaders receive immediate clarity, with full traceability back to the usage data.
6. Ineffective and Delayed Anomaly Detection
Scenario:
On a Friday evening, a misconfigured script generates duplicate storage blobs. You don’t catch the issue until Azure notifies you of an anomaly a week later, leaving you to deal with thousands of dollars lost by then.
Issue with Azure: Alerts are often delayed and too vague.
Turbo360 Solution:
Turbo360’s Budget Monitor incorporates anomaly detection, immediately flagging significant deviations in spend. This allows you to identify issues on the same day they occur, with alerts delivered through Slack, Teams, or email.
7. Reactive Approach to Cost Management
Scenario:
Your Azure bill surges by 20 percent. By the time you receive the report, the over-expenditure has already happened.
Issue with Azure: Reports reflect past data rather than providing predictive insights.
Turbo360 Solution:
Turbo360 offers proactive forecasting and scheduled reports. If your bill trends higher mid-month, Turbo360 alerts you early, giving you an opportunity to curb excessive spending before the invoice arrives.
8. Rigid Cost Allocation
Scenario:
Shared services like firewalls and databases lack proper tagging. Finance aims to allocate costs equitably, but Azure’s strict tagging requirements render this difficult.
Issue with Azure: Limited flexibility in allocation without thorough tagging.
Turbo360 Solution:
Turbo360 applies allocation policies that fairly distribute shared or untagged costs. Even in the absence of meticulous tagging, you receive accurate chargebacks, minimising disputes among teams.
9. High Entry Barrier for Non-Technical Users
Scenario:
The operations manager attempts to review spending in Azure, but the interface feels too complex, laden with SKUs, meters, and subscription IDs. Frustrated, they abandon the attempt and seek IT assistance.
Issue with Azure: The portal is not user-friendly for finance or operations staff.
Turbo360 Solution:
Turbo360 offers intuitive dashboards and detailed reports suited for business users. Non-technical teams can easily view costs expressed simply, such as “Support Department – £12,300 this month,” without needing technical translation.
10. Missed Cost Savings Opportunities
Scenario:
While you suspect there are savings potential in your Azure setup, Azure does not clearly identify them for you. By the time consultants arrive, you have incurred unnecessary costs for months.
Issue with Azure: Stops short at visibility, lacking optimisation recommendations.
Turbo360 Solution:
Turbo360 continuously monitors your spending patterns and highlights actionable opportunities for cost optimisation, from resizing workloads to eliminating waste, along with improvements in reservation use and savings plan advice. Its Scheduler feature lets you automate the shutdown and start-up of non-essential resources, ensuring you are not incurring costs when the resources are not in use.
Final Thoughts
Azure Cost Management may suffice for smaller cloud operations. However, for organisations managing over 100 subscriptions and multiple teams, it often degenerates into a mere reporting tool rather than an effective cost management solution.
Turbo360 fills this void by providing:
- D granular visibility into expenses across the business
- Proactive optimisation and actionable savings recommendations
- Continuous detection of anomalies and predictive forecasting
- User-friendly dashboards for finance and operations teams
- Automation features like scheduling to further reduce costs
If you’re weary of overspending, unnoticed waste, and delayed alerts, it’s time to transition beyond Azure Cost Management and explore Turbo360 — the native FinOps solution for Azure.
