How to Reduce Costs in 2025

As the adoption of Azure continues to surge, effectively managing cloud expenses has become essential for enterprise users. Although Azure’s pay-as-you-go model offers adaptability, organisations must implement robust cost monitoring practices to adhere to budgets and uncover spending patterns.

Azure Cost Analysis provides an innate tool for monitoring cloud expenditures. However, enterprises with multiple environments may encounter certain constraints. In this guide, we will delve into Azure’s cost management features and demonstrate how Turbo360 enables enhanced monitoring capabilities across various Azure subscriptions.

What Is Azure Cost Analysis?

Azure Cost Analysis is an integrated cost management utility that offers thorough visibility into your organisation’s Azure financial activities. This tool allows users to keep an eye on resource usage while pinpointing opportunities for cost optimisations across subscriptions.

Source: Microsoft

This tool features interactive dashboards with customisable views that break down costs by resource types, groups, services, locations, and tags.

With Azure Cost Analysis, you can:

• Track spending trends on a daily, monthly, and annual basis
• Establish and manage budgets with automated alerts
• Project future expenses based on historical patterns
• Create detailed reports for financial forecasting and chargeback purposes
• Spot underutilised resources and opportunities for cost savings

Azure Cost Analysis is accessible directly from the Azure portal under Cost Management + Billing, requiring no additional installation, making it a user-friendly starting point for organisations keen to govern their cloud costs.

Benefits of Azure Cost Analysis

Azure Cost Analysis provides numerous benefits that help engineering teams optimise their cloud expenditure.

Comprehensive Cost Visibility

This tool delivers detailed insights into your organisation’s Azure costs spread across all services and resources, categorising expenses based on various dimensions:

• Resource types
• Resource groups
• Locations
• Tags

Proactive Budget Management

With budget alerts, Azure Cost Analysis assists in averting unexpected cost surges. You can establish custom budget thresholds with automated notifications when spending approaches or exceeds these limits, allowing for prompt action to be taken before costs spiral.

Resource Optimisation Insights

The platform helps identify underutilised or idling resources that continue to incur costs without delivering business value. These insights enable organisations to:

• Implement right-sizing strategies;
• Reduce waste;
• Optimise resource allocation by actual consumption rather than assumptions.

Simplified Cost Allocation

For organisations aiming to distribute cloud costs across various business units, projects, or departments, Azure Cost Analysis provides detailed data essential for accurate chargeback and showback processes. This granular visibility encourages financial accountability within the organisation.

Informed Decision-Making

Data regarding historical spending and usage patterns allows for informed decisions on future resource provisioning and capacity planning. Teams can scrutinise past expenditures to forecast future costs and adjust their cloud strategies accordingly before launching new initiatives.

Self-Service Access

This intuitive interface makes cost data available to stakeholders beyond the finance arena. Development teams, project managers, and unit leaders can independently access relevant financial information, fostering a culture of cost awareness within the organisation.

Limitations of Azure Cost Analysis

Although Azure Cost Analysis offers ways to reduce expenses, it comes with notable limitations that enterprises should recognise:

Single Subscription View

The primary limitation is that Azure Cost Analysis only provides detailed analysis at the single subscription level. Enterprises with numerous subscriptions must toggle between them for a comprehensive cost analysis. Cross-subscription comparisons involve manual data extraction and consolidation, leading to inefficiencies in large environments.

Data Refresh Delays

Cost data usually incurs an 8-24 hour delay before reflecting in the analysis views. Real-time cost monitoring is not available, which may complicate time-sensitive decisions. Certain services might even face longer delays, hindering cost awareness.

Limited Customisation

Dashboard customisation options are more restricted when compared to third-party solutions. Advanced filtering across multiple dimensions can be challenging to implement, and custom metric creation that merges different cost factors is limited.

Restricted Historical Data

Standard data retention periods may not suffice for organisations that require extensive historical analysis. Year-over-year comparisons are restricted by data retention policies, while granular usage data has a shorter availability span than aggregated cost data, affecting long-term trend analysis.

Integration Challenges

Azure Cost Analysis has limited integration with non-Microsoft tools and platforms. Additional effort is necessary to incorporate Azure cost data into enterprise financial systems, and API limitations can impede the creation of custom reporting solutions. This can create hurdles for organisations with diverse cloud environments or established financial reporting practices.

These limitations become particularly problematic for large enterprises managing intricate multi-subscription landscapes, where comprehensive visibility across the entire Azure estate is vital for effective cost governance.

How to Use Azure Cost Analysis: Common Use Cases & Features

Azure Cost Analysis offers a robust suite of features to help organisations gain insights into their cloud spending behaviours. Let’s explore practical applications of Azure Cost Analysis, walking through common use cases and demonstrating how to leverage the platform’s visual capabilities to address critical cost management concerns.

Visualise Cost Usage by Time Period

The Azure Cost Analysis interface allows you to visualise your cost usage by applying filters over defined time periods. This makes it easy to determine the highest costs incurred by any resource group or individual resource for any selected date range.

To find out which resource groups consumed the most budget in a specific month, simply select the resource group option from the preview views when setting up your cost analysis view and specify your desired time frame.

Identify Your Most Expensive Resources

To ascertain which resource incurred the highest costs for a particular month, merely select the “resource” option from the preview views list while creating a cost analysis view, ensuring you specify the intended time period for analysis.

Anomaly detection within Cost Analysis helps you to anticipate fluctuations in costs, mitigating unexpected financial surprises. This functionality identifies unusual spending patterns and provides alerts when costs diverge from usual trends.

Discover Your Reservations Utilisation

Azure Reservations offer billing discounts while not affecting the operational state of your resources. When you purchase a reservation, the discount is automatically applied to matching resources.

You can acquire Azure Reservations by committing to one-year or three-year plans for:

• Virtual Machines
• Azure Blob Storage or Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
• SQL Database compute capacity
• Azure Cosmos DB throughput and various other Azure resources

All purchased reservation utilizations can be viewed by navigating to Reservations in the Azure portal. To examine the utilisation history and specifics, select the utilisation percentage.

Organise Costs by Properties

Azure Cost Analysis permits you to segment and visualise spending data using multiple properties tailored to your organisation’s framework and priorities. You can arrange costs by:

Key Properties:

• Resource-based: Resource type, resource group, location
• Billing: Subscription, meter category, billing account
• Business: Tags, cost centres, applications
• Optimisation: Reserved instance coverage, pricing tier, SKU

To utilise this feature, access Cost Analysis in the Azure portal, select your preferred time frame, and use the “Group by” dropdown to select your primary dimension. You can further refine your view by adding filters and saving custom configurations for future use.

Understand Billing and Resource Management Scopes

Billing governs your relationships with customers and manages invoicing for goods or services. Through your billing account, you can oversee all payments, invoices, and cost tracking in one location.

Azure comprises three resource management scopes. Each scope supports access and governance management, potentially including cost management:

• Management groups serve as hierarchical containers to organise Azure subscriptions. A management group tree can accommodate up to six levels of depth, excluding the Root and subscription levels.
• Subscriptions act as primary storage containers for Azure resources.
• Resource groups are logical collections of interconnected resources intended for an Azure solution with a uniform lifecycle. An example would be resources deployed and removed simultaneously.

Utilise Cost Alerts for Monitoring Usage and Spending

Azure Cost Analysis supports three alert types, enabling proactive monitoring of your cloud expenditures. Azure budget alerts notify you when your spending or usage reaches or surpasses the designated limit in the alert condition.

Credit alerts inform you when your Azure Prepayment (previously referred to as a financial commitment) is nearing depletion, automatically generating warnings at 90% and 100% of your Azure Prepayment credit balance.

Lastly, department spending quota alerts send notifications when your department’s expenditures exceed a predetermined threshold, supporting financial control across different organisational units.

Azure Cost Analysis Best Practices

To maximise the benefits of Azure Cost Analysis, consider these best practices.

1. Implement Consistent Resource Tagging

Establish an extensive tagging strategy across all Azure resources. Tags should reflect key business dimensions such as department, project, environment, and application.

This detailed categorisation enables meaningful cost allocation and serves as the foundation for accurate reporting. Implement automated policies to enforce tagging compliance during resource provisioning.

2. Set Up Meaningful Budget Alerts

Configure alerts at various thresholds (e.g., 70%, 85%, and 95% of the budget) to provide early warnings before surpassing financial limits.

Assign notifications to both financial stakeholders and the technical teams responsible for managing resources. This distributed awareness facilitates coordinated responses to potential overspend.

3. Schedule Regular Cost Reviews

Establish regular cost review meetings with cross-functional teams, including IT, finance, and business stakeholders.

During these meetings, assess spending trends, identify anomalies, and formulate optimisation action plans. This consistent focus on cloud expenditure fosters financial discipline in cloud operations.

4. Leverage Saved Views for Standardised Reporting

Create and share standardised cost views tailored for different stakeholder groups. Financial analysts may require comprehensive breakdowns across all resources, while development teams might benefit from focused views on their specific projects. Consistent reporting formats enhance communication and enable trend analysis over time.

5. Combine Cost Analysis with Azure Advisor

Source: Microsoft

Integrate Azure Advisor recommendations with your cost analysis processes to uncover genuine optimisation opportunities.

Azure Advisor provides actionable insights for right-sizing underutilised resources, utilising reserved instances for cost savings, and eliminating unnecessary expenses.

6. Implement Charge-Back or Show-Back Models

Utilise the detailed cost breakdowns from Azure Cost Analysis to establish internal charge-back (billing internal departments) or show-back (displaying costs without charging) models. This transparency creates accountability and motivates resource owners to optimise cloud usage by illustrating the financial impact.

7. Establish Resource Naming Conventions

Implement standardised naming conventions that reflect ownership, purpose, and environment for each resource. Consistency in naming enhances the readability of cost reports, making it easier to swiftly identify the purpose and ownership of high-cost resources, particularly in expansive environments with numerous resources.

How to Set Up and Use Azure Cost Analysis (Step-by-Step)

Getting started with Azure Cost Analysis is a breeze. Just follow these steps to configure and begin utilising this powerful cost management tool:

Step 1: Access Azure Cost Analysis

• Sign in to the Azure portal
• Type “Cost Management + Billing” in the search bar and select it from the results
• Within the Cost Management + Billing page, click on “Cost analysis” from the left navigation menu

Step 2: Select the Appropriate Scope

• In the scope dropdown at the top of the Cost Analysis page, choose the subscription, resource group, or management group you wish to analyse
• For a comprehensive analysis across the enterprise, select a management group that includes multiple subscriptions
• Your access permissions will dictate which scopes you can view

Step 3: Configure Your First Cost View

• The default view in Cost Analysis shows your accumulated costs for the current month
• Use the “Time range” dropdown to select a different period (e.g., last month, last 3 months or a custom date range)
• Choose the “Group by” dropdown to categorise costs according to different dimensions:
  • Resource type
  • Resource group
  • Location
  • Tags
  • Service name

Step 4: Apply Filters for Detailed Analysis

• Click on the “Add filter” button to refine your cost view
• Select a property for filtering (e.g., service name, resource group)
• Choose specific values to include
• Add multiple filters for targeted views

Step 5: Create and Save Custom Views

• After setting up your view with the chosen time range, grouping, and filters, click “Save” at the top of the page
• Name your view descriptively to reflect its purpose (e.g., “Monthly Infrastructure Costs by Region”)
• Optionally, add the view to your dashboard

Step 6: Set Up Cost Alerts and Budgets

• From the Cost Management + Billing page, select “Budgets” from the left navigation menu
• Click “Add” to create a new budget
• Define the budget parameters:
  • Name
  • Reset period (Monthly, Quarterly, Annually)
  • Creation date and expiration
  • Amount
• Set alert conditions (e.g., 80% of budget, 100% of budget)
• Designate alert recipients via email

Step 7: Export and Schedule Reports

• In the Cost Analysis view, click “Export” at the top of the page
• Select your desired format (CSV or Excel)
• For recurring reports, click “Schedule” instead of “Export”
• Configure the schedule, delivery method, and recipients

Step 8: Analyse Cost Forecasts

• Select a time period in your Cost Analysis view that includes future dates
• Azure will automatically show a forecast of expected costs based on historical usage patterns
• Employ this information for budget planning and to identify potential overspending before it occurs

Step 9: Explore Cost Optimisation Recommendations

• From the Cost Management + Billing page, navigate to “Advisor recommendations” from the left menu
• Review the cost optimisation suggestions provided by Azure Advisor
• For each recommendation, assess potential savings and the required effort for implementation
• Prioritise and apply recommendations based on their ROI

Monitoring Multiple Azure Subscriptions With Turbo360

The Turbo360 Cost Analyzer is an all-inclusive integrated solution offering various features tailored to meet user needs.

Azure Cost Analysis vs. Turbo360 Cost Analyzer: Feature Comparison

Analysis Views in the Cost Analyzer allow for the simultaneous visualisation of expenses from multiple Azure subscriptions and resources. Grouping and filtering options are provided to tailor views according to user preferences.

Monitors in the Cost Analyzer allow you to set a daily or monthly budget for your Azure expenses, providing notifications if actual costs exceed your budget. You can preview Azure cost trends to gather valuable insights before establishing a monitor. Monitor rules can specify parameters for resources spanning multiple subscriptions.

The Cost Optimisation feature in the Cost Analyzer enables you to create schedules for optimising resources by defining tiers, throughput values, and resource states concerning operational hours of the day.

With Turbo360’s Cost Analyzer, you can access one of the finest solutions for cost visualisation and monitoring across multiple Azure subscriptions. Experience unlimited access to all its features by signing up for a free 14-day trial today!

FAQs: Top Questions About Azure Cost Analysis For Multiple Subscriptions

Can I Have Multiple Subscriptions in Azure, and Why Would I Need Them?

Yes, it is possible to have several Azure subscriptions within a single account. Azure subscriptions act as both billing and access control boundaries. Multiple subscriptions might be essential when you hit per-subscription resource limits or aim for better governance over your Azure resources.

Why Can’t I See All My Subscription Costs in One View Using Native Azure Cost Management?

The native Azure Cost Management tool limits analysis to a single subscription level. This poses a significant drawback for enterprise organisations managing several environments in need of comprehensive visibility across their entire Azure landscape. Turbo360’s Cost Analyzer addresses this issue by providing a consolidated view of costs across all subscriptions.

How Do Management Groups Aid in Managing Multiple Subscriptions?

Management groups arrange subscriptions into hierarchies for governance and management. You can create a structure that reflects your organisation, applying policies that extend to all subscriptions within a group, while also viewing aggregated costs.

While management groups offer cross-subscription capabilities, solutions like Turbo360’s Cost Analyzer deliver deeper insights into multi-subscription cost analysis and optimisation.

How Can I Set Up Cost Allocation Across Departments When Resources Span Different Subscriptions?

Turbo360 allows you to create Cost Management Groups encompassing resources from any subscription based on departments, projects, or business dimensions.

This functionality facilitates accurate chargeback and showback models, ensuring correct cost allocation that aligns with your organisational structure, independent of technical subscription boundaries.

What Factors Should Be Considered When Developing a Subscription Scaling Strategy?

When creating a subscription scaling strategy, consider:

• Billing requirements for various departments or projects;
• Access control needs based on your organisational structure;
• Subscription-level resource limits that could necessitate additional subscriptions;
• Management overhead tied to each additional subscription;
• And how costs will be analysed across these subscriptions.

Tools like Turbo360 can alleviate the complexities associated with managing costs across multiple subscriptions through unified visibility and control.