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  • 5 min read

Azure Cost Management and Billing updates – March 2022

The Enterprise Agreement billing account management experience in the Azure portal is now generally available, there are two new preview features (including anomaly alerts), nine new and updated offers to save money on Azure, and four documentation updates.

Whether you're a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you're spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management and Billing comes in.

We're always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Azure Cost Management and Billing can help you better understand where you're accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Let's dig into the details.

 

Manage your Enterprise Agreement billing account in the Azure portal

If you manage an Enterprise Agreement (EA) billing account, you’re familiar with the EA portal where you can manage the account hierarchy, view credit balance, and view cost for each department, account, and subscription. This has been a great foundation, but did you know there are even more tools that can help you better monitor, manage, and optimize costs within the Azure portal?

When it comes to managing your billing account (enrollment), you have all the same EA tools available from Cost Management and Billing in the Azure portal:

  • Seamlessly create and manage the enrollment hierarchy.
  • Manage access to departments, accounts, and subscriptions.
  • View properties and manage policies, like the ability to view charges and purchase reservations.
  • View notification contacts for enrollment emails.

Looking beyond account management, you’ll start to see new tools to help you monitor and manage costs:

  • View and track Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) balance.
  • View and download invoices.
  • View and download consolidated usage and charges, including options for amortized reservation charges.
  • Analyze and drill into your costs in the portal or schedule automated exports.
  • Split shared costs to drive more visibility and accountability throughout the organization with cost allocation.
  • Configure budgets to get alerted before costs exceed predefined thresholds.

With these updates, managing your EA billing account from the Azure portal is now generally available for direct EA enrollments. Learn more and let us know what you’d like to see next.

 

What's new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what's coming in Azure Cost Management and can engage directly with us to share feedback and help us better understand how you use the service, so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Cost Management Labs:

  • Update: Total cost in the cost analysis previewnow available in the public portal
    See your total cost at the top of the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview or by using the cost analysis preview in Cost Management Labs.
  • New: Access preview views from classic cost analysis
    Get one-click access to the new preview views from classic cost analysis in the View menu. You can see this in classic cost analysis in Cost Management Labs.
  • New: Anomaly detection alerts
    Subscribe to automatic email alerts when a new anomaly has been detected. Anomaly detection is only available for subscriptions in the cost analysis preview. You can opt into this preview using Try Preview and then configure anomaly alerts from the Alerts page.
  • Grouping SQL databases and elastic pools
    Get an at-a-glance view of your total SQL costs by grouping SQL databases and elastic pools under their parent server in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
  • Average cost in the cost analysis preview
    See your average daily cost at the top of the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
  • Charts in the cost analysis preview
    View your daily or monthly cost over time in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
  • Budgets in the cost analysis preview
    Quickly create and edit budgets directly from the cost analysis preview. If you don’t have a budget yet, you’ll see a suggested budget based on your forecast. You can opt in using Try Preview.
  • View cost for your resources
    The cost for your resources is one click away from the resource overview in the preview portal. Just click View cost to quickly jump to the cost of that particular resource.
  • Change scope from the menu
    Change scope from the menu for quicker navigation. You can opt in using Try Preview.

Of course, that's not all. Every change in Azure Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it's in the full Azure portal. We're eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you'd like to see next. What are you waiting for? Try Cost Management Labs today.

 

New ways to save money with Azure

Lots of cost optimization improvements over the last month! Here are new and updated offers you might be interested in:

 

Documentation updates

Here are a few documentation updates you might be interested in:

Want to keep an eye on all of the documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing documentation change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request.

 

Join the Azure Cost Management and Billing team

Are you excited about helping customers and partners better manage and optimize costs? We're looking for passionate, dedicated, and exceptional people to help build best in class cloud platforms and experiences to enable exactly that. If you have experience with big data infrastructure, reliable and scalable APIs, or rich and engaging user experiences, you'll find no better challenge than serving every Microsoft customer and partner in one of the most critical areas for driving cloud success.

Watch the video below to learn more about the Azure Cost Management and Billing team:

Watch the video: Join the Commerce Platform and Experiences (CPX) Microsoft Team

Join our team.

What's next?

These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don't forget to check out the previous Azure Cost Management and Billing updates. We're always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow @AzureCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. You can also share ideas and vote up others in the Cost Management feedback forum or join the research panel to participate in a future study and help shape the future of Azure Cost Management and Billing.

We know these are trying times for everyone. Best wishes from the Azure Cost Management and Billing team. Stay safe and stay healthy.