My company is currently expanding its usage on the Microsoft Azure platform. Due to increased usage of the platform there has been a desire to get better visibility and alerts into what Azure is costing us and where it is costing us. Particularly we want to see a day to day comparison with alerts. Current offerings from Azure in this area are lackluster and need some additional polishing, which Microsoft is doing, but not fast enough. I have researched each of the options available to me and will discuss them here.

1. Azure Cost Management + Billing: This option has some very nice graphs and breaks down costs nicely between the difference resources in use. Where it lacks is in alerts. Currently summary notices are setup for time periods monthly or greater. Furthermore, you can only set budgets on a monthly basis, so if one day a resource consumes a massive amount of money, you won't get alerted until that consumption reaches your budget alert.

2. Power BI: If you are on an Enterprise Azure Agreement you have access to a free Power BI dashboard that will give you a breakdown of your Azure costs with a wide variety of filters. Power BI provides an excellent array of graphs, particularly for comparing costs side by side. However, if you wish to receive regular emails of data you are required to have a Power BI Pro license. Another issue is that is messes up resource names and makes somethings difficult to read.

3. Azure EA Portal: If you are an Azure Enterprise Agreement customer then you have the EA portal (ea.azure.com). This site gives you a great summary of how much you are spending on Azure each month as opposed to your annual "commit"(amount of money put on account). It also gives you individual data on each resource and its cost. However, it is not arranged in a way that is easy to read.

4. Cloudyn: Cloudyn is a third party that plugs into Azure and does cost reporting. They have a free level of the service as well as a paid level that gives you more control over your data. I tested out a 30 day free trial with Cloudyn. I was not impressed: the management was confusing, it was slow to pull data over from Azure, and now that I am back on the free level it is completely broken and won't show me anything anymore.

5. REST:The final option I have tested is using the REST API provided by Microsoft to pull Cost and Billing information for Azure. The biggest advantage of this method is that it does not require you to log into or navigate sites to get to the page you want. This is particularly important for managers who don't want to manually check everything every day but just want alerts. This does require coding knowledge but does provide the most control over your data. This is the route that i have opted to take to get better visibility into my costing data for Azure. There are two different API's, one for Pay as You Go customer and Enterprise customers.

To conclude I believe the Cost Center in the Azure portal will be the best place to get Cost data. This is where Microsoft seems to be putting the majority of their resources, support has told me this as well. For the short term I still need daily cost information so I am going to get it through the use of the REST API. My next article will be about getting into using the REST API and using it to get the data I want.