Task: Analyze Costs

Video: Manage Costs

Estimated time: 15 minutes

Goal

The goal of this task is to explore built-in Azure cost controls. This includes establishing a budget with alerts, viewing the recommendations from the cost advisor and exporting a daily cost summary.

Pre-requisites

1. Non-production Azure subscription

Requirements

1. Requirement 1: Define a budget
2. Requirement 2: Use the Cost Advisor
3. Requirement 3: Export monthly cost report

Pre-requisite setup

This task does not require any pre-requisite setup.

Requirement 1: Define a budget

For this requirement you need to configure a monthly budget with three alerts. Set the budget to $1000, with e-mail alerts at 50%, 80%, and 100% of budget. You will need to set up an action group for the alerts. To set up an action group:

• Navigate to an Alerts page in the Azure portal. This can be under the Azure Monitor blade or the blade for one of the resources.
• From the Alerts page, navigate to the action group page and add an action group with the following settings:

Requirement 2: Use the Cost Advisor

Run the cost advisor and note any recommendations. Click the See list of cost recommendations link to view documentation on common cost reduction actions.

Requirement 3: Export monthly cost report

Generate a resource cost report for the last month. Add a scheduled daily export of billing-period-to-date costs. Define a new storage account in a new resource group named task-billing-rg. Once the export is provisioned, execute a run and then verify that a CSV file has been generated.

Optional:

Download the CSV file and open it in Excel, or any other spreadsheet tool.

Cleanup

Delete the task-billing-rg resource group to clean up this task.