We are excited to announce the general availability of Azure Cost Management features for all Pay-As-You-Go and Azure Government customers that will greatly enhance your ability to analyze and proactively manage your cloud costs. These features will allow you to analyze your cost data, configure budgets to drive accountability for cloud costs, and export pre-configured reports on a schedule to support deeper data analysis within your own systems. This release for Pay-As-You-Go customers also provides invoice reconciliation support in the Azure portal via a usage csv download of all charges applicable to your invoices.
New feature
Azure Usage Download for invoice reconciliation
As a part of this general availability for Pay-As-You-Go customers, we are now providing usage download capabilities in the Azure portal. This downloadable csv file can be used to reconcile your charges with your monthly invoice.
Your usage download file can also be accessed by a new API that is now available for developers. To learn more about developing on top of our APIs, including Usage Download, please visit our Azure REST API documentation.
Generally available features
The features below are now generally available for Pay-As-You-Go and Azure Government customers within the Azure portal. Log into the Azure portal and test them out today! If you are a Government customer, log into the Azure Government portal.
Cost analysis
This feature allows you to track costs over the course of the month and offers you a variety of ways to analyze your data. To learn more about how to use Cost Analysis, please visit our documentation, “Quickstart: Explore and analyze costs with Cost analysis.”
Budgets
Use budgets to proactively manage costs and drive accountability within your organization. To learn more about using Azure budgets please visit our documentation, “Tutorial: Create and manage Azure budgets.”
Exports
Export all of your cost data to an Azure storage account using our new exports feature. You can use this data in external systems and combine it with your own data to maximize your cost management capabilities. To learn more about using Azure exports please visit our documentation, “Tutorial: Create and manage exported data.”
GA data limitations
The GA release of the features identified above has a few limitations that are identified below. We expect to bring many of these features to you soon so stay tuned for announcements of future releases!
- Feature support for Pay-As-You-Go customers is available for native Azure resources only. Resources available via the Azure Marketplace, including recurring charges, will be supported in upcoming releases.
- Cost management data for Pay-As-You-Go customers is currently only available from September 2018 and later. Data prior to this date can be accessed via the Usage Details API.
- Feature support for Azure Reserved Instances is not currently available for Pay-As-You-Go or Azure Government customers and will be incorporated into upcoming releases.
- Feature support for the Power BI Content Pack is not currently available for Pay-As-You-Go customers and will be incorporated into upcoming releases.
Follow us on Twitter @AzureCostMgmt for exciting cost management updates.
