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  • 6 min read

Microsoft Cost Management updates—February 2024

By Sameer Doultani, Principal Product Manager
February 2024 Microsoft Cost Management 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 it’s being spent, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Microsoft Cost Management comes in. 

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 it’s being spent, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Microsoft Cost Management comes in. 

We’re always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Microsoft Cost Management 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. 

Azure Carbon Optimization 

We know that optimizing the cloud for maximum value is important to companies for hitting their financial and business goals. In addition to this, companies are also aware of the impact of the cloud on the environment and are always looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint to achieve their sustainability goals. The Azure Carbon Optimization tool now available through the Azure portal provides IT admins and engineers emissions data at resource level. They can monitor and track their emissions data and analyze trends. The tool also provides recommendations to reduce the emissions and the associated cost savings. 

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Microsoft Fabric

The resource level emissions data is also made available through Microsoft Azure emissions insight (preview) in sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. This gives flexibility to slice and dice the emissions data based on your reporting and business needs. You can also export the cost data and ingest it to Microsoft Fabric to build reports for resource level costs and join with emissions data, enabling you to optimize your costs and reduce your carbon footprint. 

Both these new capabilities are covered in detail in the blog post “Achieving sustainable growth with Azure and FinOps best practices.” 

Pricing updates for Azure.com 

We’ve been working hard to make some exciting changes to our Azure pricing experiences, and we can’t wait to share them with you. These changes will make it easier than ever for you to estimate the costs of your solutions. 

  • First, we’re excited to announce that enterprise customers with MCA or EA discounts on top of the regular Azure Savings Plan discounts are now able to view those in their calculator estimates. 
  • We’ve made some fantastic updates to Azure AI Speech, including the addition of commitment tiers with more pricing options, a new Neural HD offer, and a new pricing setup for text-to-speech (TTS) avatar and personal voice. Azure OpenAI Service has also introduced some amazing new features, including GPT3.5 Turbo, GPT 4, Assistants API and Code Interpreter, and speech models: Text to speech. 
  • We’re thrilled to announce that the Linux Virtual Machines Dps, Eps, and Dpl v5 ARM-based series, Azure Elastic SAN, and Azure SQL Database Hyperscale tier are now generally available. Azure NetApp Files now has double encryption generally available, providing even more security for your data. 
  • We’ve made some major improvements to our pages, including a redesign of the Azure Virtual Desktop page to simplify navigation. We’ve also launched new pricing pages and calculator for Azure Modeling and Simulation Workbench, and updated the Azure Cache for Redis pricing page with zone redundancy and more information on reservation offers for Enterprise and Enterprise flash. Azure Media Services is retiring and we added a banner announcing retirement to its pricing page. 
  • We’ve made a number of other updates, including the addition of pricing for the new NDsr H00 v5 series and Windows instance for MSv3 to Linux Virtual Machines, the addition of new VM families to Azure Red Hat OpenShift, and improvements to the computer vision pricing calculator. Azure Kubernetes Service now has a new Premium tier, and Azure Databricks has a new limited-time discount for SQL Pro and Serverless SQL. Azure SQL Managed Instance has calculator updates for parity, and Azure DNS has added a Private Resolver offer to the calculator. 

We’re constantly working to improve our pricing tools and make them more accessible and user-friendly. We hope you find these changes helpful in estimating the costs for your Azure solutions. If you have any feedback or suggestions for future improvements, please let us know! 

Help shape the future of cost reporting 

Thank you to all those who participated in the pricing calculator design survey last month. Your responses have been received and reviewed. 

What’s new in Cost Management Labs 

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what’s coming in Microsoft 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: 

  • Exports (preview) 
    Set up automatic exports of multiple FinOps datasets that support file partition and data overwrite. The new datasets include cost and usage details (FOCUS), price sheet, reservation recommendations, reservation transactions, and reservation details.
  • Currency switcher in Cost analysis smart views    
    View your non-USD charges in USD or switch between the currencies you have charges in to view the total cost for that currency only. To change currency, select Customize at the top of the view and select the currency you would like to apply. Currency selection is not applicable to those with only USD charges. Currency selection is enabled by default in Cost Management Labs.
  • Streamlined Cost Management menu   
    Organize Cost Management tools into related sections for reporting, monitoring, optimization, and configuration settings.
  • Recent and pinned views in the Cost analysis preview
    Show all classic and smart views in Cost analysis and streamline navigation by prioritizing recently used and pinned views.
  • Forecast in Cost analysis smart views   
    Show your forecast cost for the period at the top of Cost analysis preview.
  • Group related resources in Cost analysis smart views     
    Group related resources, like disks under virtual machines or web apps under App Service plans, by adding a “cm-resource-parent” tag to the child resources with a value of the parent resource ID.  
  • Charts in Cost analysis smart views   
    View your daily or monthly cost over time in Cost analysis smart views.
  • Open config items in the menu
    Experimental option to show the selected configuration screen as a nested menu item in the Cost Management menu. Please share feedback. 

New ways to save money in the Microsoft Cloud 

Here are new and updated offers you might be interested in: 

New videos and learning opportunities

Here is a video to test and improve your Azure optimization skills: 

Follow the Microsoft Cost Management YouTube channel to stay in the loop with new videos as they’re released and let us know what you’d like to see next. 

Want a more guided experience? Start with Control Azure spending and manage bills with Microsoft Cost Management and Billing. 

Documentation updates 

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

Want to keep an eye on all 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. You can also submit a GitHub issue. We welcome and appreciate all contributions! 

What’s next? 

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

Follow @MSCostMgmt on X 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 Microsoft Cost Management. 

Best wishes from the Microsoft Cost Management team.  

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