SQLBits 2020

Azure Cost Management

Learn the tools and techniques you can use to create governance and insights around your Azure spend

One of the benefits of the cloud is the ability to be able to create resources quickly and on-demand as you need them. However, without proper control and monitoring, this can quickly generate some not-so-pleasant surprises when your bill arrives. Cost management used to be something that data professionals rarely had to think about, but the cloud is changing that. Unlike on-premise environments, every decision in the cloud we make to deploy or scale comes at a cost that has to be considered.

In this session, we want to show you how you can create governance around your Azure environment to avoid these surprises and start getting the most from your spend while still being able to maintain the flexibility that makes the cloud so valuable. We will discuss how you can allocate costs to specific areas and create more accountability in your organization using things such as tagging. We will also dive heavily into the Azure Cost Management + Billing portion of the portal and talk about analyzing spends, how you can create more visibility to the organization, creating budgets and things you can do with them, alerting around billing\spends, and how to review and interpret the cost saving recommendations that Azure provides. We will also discuss how you can use Azure Consumption Insights to start building your own reports in PowerBI using this data.