Let’s dig into the details\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Azure Cost Management is now generally available for the following account types:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Public cloud<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Azure Government<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Stay tuned for more information about preview support for additional account types and clouds, like Cloud Solution Providers (CSP) and Sponsorship subscriptions. We know how critical it is for you to have a rich set of cost management tools for every <\/em>account across every <\/em>cloud, and we hear you loud and clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Many organizations are adopting multi-cloud strategies for additional flexibility, but with increased flexibility comes increased complexity. From different cost models and billing cycles to underlying cloud architectures, having a single cross-cloud cost management solution is no longer a luxury, but a fundamental requirement to efficiently and effectively monitor, control, and optimize costs. This is where Azure Cost Management can help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Start by creating a new AWS cloud connector from the Azure portal. From the home page of the Azure<\/a> portal select the Cost Management<\/a> tile. Then, select Cloud connectors (preview)<\/a> and click the “Add” command. Simply specify a name, pick the management group you want AWS costs to be rolled up to, and configure the AWS connection details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cost Management will start ingesting AWS costs as soon as the AWS cost and usage report is available. If you created a new cost and usage report, AWS may take up to 24 hours to start exporting data. You can check the latest status from the cloud connectors list<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once available, open cost analysis<\/a> and change the scope to the management group you selected when creating the connector. Group by provider to see a break down of AWS and Azure costs. If you connected multiple AWS accounts or have multiple Azure billing accounts, group by billing account to see a break down by account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to seeing AWS and Azure costs together, you can also change the scope to your AWS consolidated or linked accounts to drill into AWS costs specifically. Create budgets for your AWS scopes to get notified as costs hit important thresholds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Managing AWS costs is free to use and you will not be charged during the preview. If you would like to automatically upgrade when AWS support is generally available, navigate to the connector, and select the Automatically charge the 1 percent at general availability<\/strong> option, then select the desired subscription to charge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For more information about managing AWS costs, see the documentation “Manage AWS costs and usage in Azure<\/a>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Learning a new service can take time. Reading through documentation is great, but you’ve told us that sometimes you just want a quick video to get you started. Well, here are eight:<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’re looking for something a little more in-depth, try these:<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n As you know, your pay-as-you-go and dev\/test subscriptions are billed based on the day you signed up for Azure. They don\u2019t map to calendar months, like EA and MCA billing accounts. This has made reporting on and controlling costs for each bill a little harder, but now you have the tools you need to effectively manage costs based on your specific billing cycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you open cost analysis for a PAYG subscription, it defaults to the current billing period. From there, you can switch to a previous billing period or select multiple billing periods. More on the extended date picker options later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you want to get notified before your bill hits a specific amount, create a budget for the billing month. You can also specify if you want to track a quarterly or yearly budget by billing period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes you need to export data and integrate it with your own datasets. Cost Management offers the ability to automatically push data to a storage account on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Now you can export your data as it is aligned to the billing period, instead of the calendar month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We love hearing your suggestions, so let us know if there’s anything else that would help you better manage costs during your personalized billing period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Scheduled exports enable you to react to new data being pushed to you instead of periodically polling for updates. As an example, a daily export of month-to-date data will push a new CSV file every day from January 1-31. These daily month-to-date exports have been updated to continue to push data on the configured schedule until they include the full dataset for the period. For example, the same daily month-to-date export would continue to push new January data on February first and February second to account for any data which may have been delayed. The update guarantees you will receive a full export for every period, starting April 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For more information about how cost data is processed, see the documentation “Understand Cost Management data<\/a>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n You’ve told us that analyzing cost trends and investigating spending anomalies sometimes requires a broad set of date ranges. You may want to look at the current billing period to keep an eye on your next bill or maybe you need to look at the last 30 days in a monthly status meeting. Some teams are even looking at the last 7 days on a weekly or even daily basis to identify spending anomalies and react as quickly as possible. Not to mention the need for longer-term trend analysis and fiscal planning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Based on all the great feedback you’ve shared around needing a rich set of one-click date options, cost analysis now offers an extended date picker with more options to make it easier than ever for you to get the data you need quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We also noticed trends in how you navigate between periods. To simplify this, you can now quickly navigate backward and forward in time using the < PREVIOUS<\/strong> and NEXT ><\/strong> links at the top of the date picker. Try it yourself<\/a> and let us know what you think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n We’ve heard you loud and clear about how important it is to save and share customized views in cost analysis. You already know you can pin a customized view to the Azure portal dashboard, and you already know you can share dashboards with others. Now you can share a direct link to that same customized view. If somebody who doesn’t have access to the scope opens the link they’ll get an access denied message, but they can change the scope to keep the customizations and apply them to their own scope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can also customize the scope to share a targeted URL. Here’s the format of the URL:<\/p>\n\n\n\n https:\/\/portal.azure.com# [@#{domain}] <\/strong>\/blade\/Microsoft_Azure_CostManagement\/Menu\/open\/CostAnalysis [\/scope\/{url-encoded-scope}] <\/strong>\/view\/{view-config}<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The domain is optional. If you remove that, the user’s preferred domain will be used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The scope is also optional. If you remove that, the user’s default scope will be the first billing account, management group, or subscription found. If you specify a custom scope, remember to URL-encode (e.g. “\/” \u2192 “%2F”) the scope, otherwise cost analysis will not load correctly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The view configuration is a gzipped, URL-encoded JSON object. As an example, here’s how you can decode a customized view:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Understanding how the view configuration works means you can:<\/p>\n\n\n\n You’ll hear more about the view configuration soon, so keep an eye out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lots of documentation updates! Here are a few you might be interested in:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Want to keep an eye on all documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management doc change history<\/a> in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select “Edit” at the top of the doc and submit a quick pull request.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These are just a few of the big updates from the last month. We’re always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nExpanded general availability (GA): Pay-as-you-go and Azure Government<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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New preview: Manage AWS and Azure costs together in the Azure portal<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/af7665d7-a069-4b9a-be26-81e203d46d1b.webp\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/7a229670-daf6-4e8a-a879-9685bfe3ef22.webp\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nNew getting started videos<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Monitor costs based on your pay-as-you-go billing period<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/bfb936a5-0553-42b9-bc39-cf740dbc1b0c.webp\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/8e9d9281-503e-4ba9-b022-90b62731a338.webp\")
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nMore comprehensive scheduled exports<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Extended date picker in cost analysis<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/0de6bc22-b663-4608-b893-82a57939c185.webp\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nShare links to customized views<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/bcc3f84d-8417-4754-910f-e5163b8b13e1.webp\")
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{
\"version\":\"2019-04-01-preview\",
\"queryVersion\":\"2019-04-01-preview\",
\"metric\":\"ActualCost\",
\"query\":{
\"type\":\"Usage\",
\"timeframe\":\"Custom\",
\"timePeriod\":{\"from\":\"2019-04-18\",\"to\":\"2019-05-17\"},
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \"dataset\":{
\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \"granularity\":\"Daily\",
\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \"aggregation\":{\"totalCost\":{\"name\":\"PreTaxCost\",\"function\":\"Sum\"}},
\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \"grouping\":[{\"type\":\"dimension\",\"name\":\"ResourceGroupName\"}],
<\/code> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \"filter\":{\"and\":[]}
\u00a0 \u00a0 },
\u00a0 },
\u00a0 \"chart\":\"StackedColumn\",
\u00a0 \"accumulated\":false,
\u00a0 \"pivots\":[
\u00a0 \u00a0 {\"type\":\"Dimension\",\"name\":\"Meter\"},
\u00a0 \u00a0 {\"type\":\"Dimension\",\"name\":\"ResourceType\"},
\u00a0 \u00a0 {\"type\":\"Dimension\",\"name\":\"ResourceId\"}
\u00a0 ]
}<\/code><\/pre><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n\n
Documentation updates<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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What’s next?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n