A spending threshold you set in Cost Management for a management group, subscription or resource group. Alerts go out as real or forecast costs approach it, yet hitting the figure never halts any resource; wiring it to an action group lets automation react.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Budget in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Set
Secret permission in Key Vault for writing secrets; some older material refers to it as Create.
- Cost Management
Azure's service for analysing costs, setting budgets and reporting by tag on resources that already run in Azure; it can't forecast what a migration will cost beforehand.
- Management group
An Azure scope that sits over subscriptions. Policies and role assignments set there flow down to every subscription, resource group and resource it contains.
- subscription
Entitlement bought for a product under VCF 9.0 licensing, carrying a set capacity. Where active ones share the same site, unit and product, their capacity is combined into licences, which are then allocated to vCenters.
- Resource group
Container for Azure resources. Its location holds only metadata and cannot be changed afterwards, and one resource group cannot sit inside another.
- Action group
Azure Monitor's reusable definition of contacts and automated responses for when an alert or budget fires. Contacts can be reached by email, SMS, push or voice; responses include webhooks, Functions, Logic Apps and Automation runbooks. Budgets alone can only send notifications.
Related terms
- Billing policy
Ties an Azure subscription and resource group to the whole tenant or to one group, so that pay-as-you-go Copilot usage (SharePoint agents or agents in Copilot Chat, for instance) gets charged. Admins create them in the Microsoft 365 admin center, can have 50 at most, and a budget on one only raises alerts.
- Organizational Model for Enterprise Architecture
An output of the Preliminary Phase that defines the architecture function's scope, budget, roles, responsibilities and governance, as well as where one architecture team's remit ends and another's begins.