Azure Cost Management and Billing updates – September 2021

Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

• Share reservations across subscriptions with management groups.
• New cost view for services and products.
• Help shape the future of Azure Cost Management and Billing.
• What’s new in Cost Management Labs.
• New ways to save money with Azure.
• New videos and learning opportunities.
• Documentation updates.
• Join the Azure Cost Management and Billing team.

Let’s dig into the details.

Share reservations across subscriptions with management groups

Azure reservations allow you to save up to 72 percent compared to pay-as-you-go rates on 21 Azure and Marketplace services. Whether you’re deploying compute, network, and storage infrastructure or building apps and databases, if you have consistent usage of the services you use, make sure you look into Azure reservations to optimize cost without sacrificing capabilities. If you’re familiar with reservations, you may already know they apply to the entire billing account or can be scoped to a specific subscription or resource group. Now, you can also scope your reservations to a management group to share the benefit across multiple subscriptions within the billing account.

Learn more about reservations and start saving today.

New cost view for services and products

The cost analysis preview introduced new cost views optimized for Resources, Resource groups, Subscriptions, and Reservations with informational cost insights and a new download experience. This month, you can add a view that helps you understand what you’re using in the new Services view.

The Services view shows your cost broken down by service with an option to view the products with charges nested under each. As with the other views in the cost analysis preview, this is an early peek at what’s coming. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Help shape the future of Azure Cost Management and Billing

Do you use Azure Cost Management and Billing to manage your cloud spending? Are you familiar with Azure cost analysis? We’re working on updated designs for the cost analysis tool and will be running a usability study to gather feedback on these changes to understand how they can better meet your needs and expectations.

If you or someone you know has experience with cost analysis, we would love to get your feedback. If you are interested in participating, please contact our research team.

What’s new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what’s coming in Azure Cost Management and can engage directly with us to share feedback and help us better understand how you use the service, so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Cost Management Labs:

• New: Cost analysis view for services and products – now available in the public portal
  Introducing a new view that breaks your costs down by the services and products you use. You can see the new view in the cost analysis preview. Let us know what you’d like to see next.
• New: Subscribe to updates of your saved cost views
  You already know you can save and share custom views in cost analysis. Now you can also subscribe to updates and share those views with people outside the portal on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. You can opt-in using Try Preview or by using classic cost analysis in Cost Management Labs.
• New: Multitasking in the cost analysis preview
  Introducing a new tabbed experience in the cost analysis preview. Start with a list of the built-in views and open multiple tabs to explore different aspects of your costs simultaneously. You can opt-in using Try Preview or by using the cost analysis preview in Cost Management Labs. Let us know what you think. We’re looking for explicit feedback here.
• View cost for your resources
  The cost for your resources is one click away from the resource overview in the preview portal. Just click View cost to quickly jump to the cost of that particular resource.
• Change scope from the menu
  Change scope from the menu for quicker navigation. You can opt-in using Try Preview.
• Open configuration items in the main menu
  This is an experimental option to show the selected configuration screen as a nested menu item in the Cost Management menu. You can opt-in using Try Preview from Cost Management Labs.
• Streamlined Cost Management menu
  Only show settings in Configuration. Remove Exports and Connectors for AWS from the Cost Management menu. You can opt-in using Try Preview from Cost Management Labs.

Of course, that’s not all. Every change in Azure Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it’s in the full Azure portal. We’re eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you’d like to see next. What are you waiting for? Try Cost Management Labs today.

New ways to save money with Azure

Lots of cost optimization improvements over the past month! Here are a few you might be interested in:

• General availability: Azure Blob storage last access time tracking.
• General availability: Server Message Block (SMB) Multichannel for Azure Files.
• General availability: Azure Files storage capacity reservations for premium, hot, and cool tiers.
• General availability: Azure ExpressRoute Direct is available in Denver, Newport (Wales), and Pune.
• General availability: Azure Machine Learning in Japan West.
• General availability: Increased hourly request limit in Azure App Configuration.
• Preview: On-demand capacity reservations for virtual machines.

New videos and learning opportunities

If you’re using Azure Backup, here’s a new video you might be interested in:

• Optimize costs of your backups with Azure Backup (12 minutes).

Follow the Azure Cost Management and Billing YouTube channel to stay in the loop with new videos as they’re released and let us know what you’d like to see next.

Want a more guided experience? Start with Control Azure spending and manage bills with Azure Cost Management and Billing.

Documentation updates

Here are a couple documentation updates you might be interested in:

• Added note about Renewing expired reservations.
• Added details about when you may need to convert your subscription to a pay-as-you-go offering.

Want to keep an eye on all of the documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing doc change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request.

Join the Azure Cost Management and Billing team

Are you excited about helping customers and partners better manage and optimize costs? We’re looking for passionate, dedicated, and exceptional people to help build best in class cloud platforms and experiences to enable exactly that. If you have experience with big data infrastructure, reliable and scalable APIs, or rich and engaging user experiences, you’ll find no better challenge than serving every Microsoft customer and partner in one of the most critical areas for driving cloud success.

Join our team.

What’s next?

These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don’t forget to check out the previous Azure Cost Management and Billing updates. We’re always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow @AzureCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. You can also share ideas and vote up others in the Cost Management feedback forum or join the research panel to participate in a future study and help shape the future of Azure Cost Management and Billing.

We know these are trying times for everyone. Best wishes from the Azure Cost Management and Billing team. Stay safe and stay healthy.

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