Microsoft Cost Management updates—May 2025 | Technology & AI bringing to light

Nobody likes an unexpected bill, and that’s where Microsoft Cost Management becomes invaluable.

Whether you are a first-time student, a burgeoning startup, or a large corporation, financial limitations are a reality. It’s crucial to have a grasp on your expenditures, understand where they are going, and effectively plan for the future. No one enjoys being caught off guard with their bills, and that’s precisely why Microsoft Cost Management is essential.

We’re keen to learn more about your challenges and illustrate how Microsoft Cost Management can enhance your understanding of cloud expenditures, help identify and curb unnecessary spending, and optimise costs so you can achieve more with less. Below are some of the recent enhancements and updates:

Azure Cloud Sustainability—From Migration to Optimisation

Cloud sustainability, a key feature of FinOps, is described by the FinOps Foundation as a means for organisations to make cloud utilisation decisions that consider both environmental impacts and broader sustainability ambitions. To assist you on your sustainability journey from migration to carbon optimisation, we’re excited to unveil two new releases:

Preview of Sustainability in Azure Migrate
General Availability of Carbon Optimisation in Azure

Azure Migrate—Preview of Estimated Carbon Emissions

Many are already utilising the Azure Migrate service, which aids you in planning and executing your migration from on-premises setups to Azure. This service also offers cost forecasts for transitioning your on-premises infrastructure to Azure, allowing IT and cloud teams to effectively plan their operational budgets. Now, Azure Migrate has introduced a preview feature for managing your sustainability profile, which provides insights into potential carbon emissions savings when migrating to Azure. With this information, teams can evaluate how migration supports both their financial and sustainability targets. For more details, check out this article.

Now Available: Carbon Optimisation

Upon migrating to the cloud or if you’re already embedded in it, the Carbon Optimisation extension in the Azure portal provides in-depth carbon emissions analytics alongside recommendations to mitigate your carbon footprint. This emissions data can also be accessed through REST APIs, enabling you to create tailored reports and dashboards that integrate cost data. Similar to cost analytics, you can examine this data at various levels within Azure hierarchy—subscriptions, resource groups, or individual resources, and even segment it by locations and resource types.

For further insight, please refer to this article.

Shown below is the monthly emissions data for a subscription:

Efficiently Managing Purchases for Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) Customers

To facilitate better management of your acquisitions from Microsoft—such as reserved instances, savings plans, and Marketplace purchases—we’ve enhanced the purchase records in Cost Management for MCA customers. Extra purchase details can be retrieved by downloading or exporting your cost and usage files, with some details also available in Cost Analysis. Note, no new columns or fields were added; existing fields were populated with the additional information.

New Fields for Cost Allocation

Subscription ID for Reserved Instances (RI) and Savings Plans (SP) Purchases.

All RI and SP purchases now come with the billing subscription ID, which allows you to allocate costs back to the owner or correct department per your cost allocation strategy. For entity or business unit allocation, you can leverage the amortised data in Cost Management.

Tags and Metadata for Marketplace Purchases.

Tags have always been a simple yet powerful tool for identifying the origin of cost records. Previously, while you could tag Marketplace purchases, this was not reflected in Cost Management for grouping or allocation. With the recent updates, tags are now included in the cost detail datasets and available for analysis in Cost Management. Be sure to tag Marketplace items during purchase.

We’ve also added resourceUri, derived subscription ID, and resource group name for your Marketplace purchases.

Evaluating Your Savings

We’ve also incorporated data into purchases that help you analyse your savings based on your negotiated discounts aligned with your MCA agreement. The following fields will now be populated:

PayGPrice: The retail price per unit in pricing currency.
PayGCostInUSD and PayGCostInBillingCurrency: The retail cost in USD and your billing currency, respectively.
EffectivePrice: The price charged per unit after your negotiated discounts are applied.

These updates grant you the ability to compare retail and discounted rates, thus providing better visibility into the implications of your custom pricing, and ensuring more precise tracking of your savings.

Further Data Enhancements

Service term dates: The servicePeriodStartDate and servicePeriodEndDate columns now clearly outline the duration of the purchased offer, making your commitments more transparent.

For clients with monthly billing cycles for commitment-based offers, the pricingCurrency and costInPricingCurrency fields will present values for all installments, ensuring you have a complete overview of your billing.

Customers utilising Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners can now view purchases and refunds at the subscription level, increasing transparency and control over their spending.

Limited Preview: Export to Microsoft Fabric

In our November 2024 blog, we announced the limited rollout of exports to Microsoft Fabric. This feature allows you to directly export your cost and price datasets into Microsoft Fabric, streamlining the ingestion of cost data from your storage account. If you are an Azure customer on the public cloud, you can now configure this feature directly by following the instructions outlined in this form.

With Fabric’s advanced AI-driven capabilities for data analysis and reporting across multiple sources, I highly encourage you to explore this exciting feature.

Discover New Ways to Save in the Microsoft Cloud

Here’s a selection of new and updated offers designed for cost savings and optimisation that you may find interesting.

New Videos and Learning Resources

Last month, we introduced several new videos designed to enhance your understanding and expertise. Whether you are new to Cost Management or looking for a refresher, these resources will be incredibly useful.

Updates to Documentation

To stay informed about all documentation updates, keep an eye on the Cost Management and Billing documentation change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you notice anything missing, simply click Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request. Alternatively, you can submit a GitHub issue. We truly value and appreciate your contributions!

What’s Next for Cost Management

These are just a few of the significant updates from last month. Be sure to explore the previous Microsoft Cost Management updates.