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.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Cost Management in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Budgets
In Cost Management, spending limits you can scope and filter by tag, which raise alerts when actual or forecast spend nears or passes them.
- Tag
Key-value label on compute (for cost tracking) or on a Unity Catalog securable or column, applied with
SET TAGorSET TAGSand requiringAPPLY TAG. Governed tags restrict allowed keys, values and assigners across the account.
Related terms
- Azure pricing calculator
A free website for working out roughly what Azure services will cost before deployment; when signed in it reflects prices your organisation has negotiated. Once resources are running, Cost Management is the tool for tracking spend.
- Budget
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.
- Cost analysis
Lets you slice and explore Azure spending in Cost Management by scope, tag, service or time period.
- Cost reporting
Tracking spending across subscriptions by tagging resources and then grouping Cost Management budgets and reports on those tags.
- Decommissioned management group
A management group for landing zones that are being retired. Subscriptions placed there are cancelled; the Cloud Adoption Framework page on management groups states that Azure removes them after 30 to 60 days, while Cost Management allows 90 days from cancellation.
- Predictability
The cloud advantage of knowing in advance how things will perform, helped by autoscaling and load balancing, and what they will cost, helped by the pricing calculator and Cost Management.
- Tag inheritance
A Cost Management option that applies tags from billing accounts, subscriptions and resource groups to the usage records of child resources in cost data, without actually tagging the resources.