Microsoft Cost Management updates—May 2023 | Azure Blog

Optimization isn’t purely about slicing prices—it’s about maximizing effectivity and maximizing worth with the cloud. The largest strategy to drive effectivity continues to be right-sizing current investments. Now you may customise the lookback interval for digital machine right-sizing suggestions in Azure Advisor to tune suggestions even additional.

Updates for Azure.com pricing experiences

• We’ve added a new feature to our Virtual Machines Selector tool—”Add to Portal”. Now, with the click of a button, you can switch from discovery to deployment when exploring Azure Virtual Machines.
• We have brought some notable changes to the Azure pricing experience this month. Azure pricing now supports Poland Central. Additionally, you can estimate your costs using the Azure Savings Plan in the Azure Kubernetes Service and the Azure Virtual Desktop pricing calculators. Additionally, thanks to your feedback, we’ve added a new FAQ about exchange rates to our pricing FAQs.
• We’ve released several new updates in Microsoft Build 2023 that we’re excited about! We’ve introduced a new Hyperscale service tier in Elastic Pools on SQL DB services, Azure Deployment Environments is also now generally available, and Azure Spring Apps now includes a new Dedicated Plan pricing.
• On top of all that, we have also introduced new pricing offers for various services including: Virtual Machines (new HX & HBv4 series), Computer Vision (pricing for Project Florence), Block Blobs Storage (a new optimized Cold access tier), Azure NetApp files (a new capacity pools capability), Azure Firewall (new Basic tier for Secured Virtual Hub), API Management (estimation for workspaces added to the pricing calculator), Container Apps (new dedicated plan), and a new service Azure Container Storage.

We hope that these changes will streamline your workflow and help you accurately estimate the cost of your solutions in Azure. Please feel free to leave us feedback or make suggestions for future pricing improvements—we’re always eager to hear your thoughts!

Automate cost savings with Azure Resource Graph in Azure Government and Azure China

Azure Resource Graph enables you to explore your Azure resources across subscriptions. You can use advanced filtering, grouping, and sorting based on resource properties and relationships to target specific workloads and even take that further to automate resource management and governance at scale. Now, with the addition of Azure Advisor recommendations, you can also query your cost saving recommendations.

Querying for recommendations is easy. Just open Azure Resource Graph in the Azure portal and explore the advisorresources table. Let’s say you want a summary of your potential cost savings opportunities:

advisorresources
// First, we trim down the list to only cost recommendations
| where type == 'microsoft.advisor/recommendations'
| where properties.category == 'Cost'
//
// Then we group rows...
| summarize
// ...count the resources and add up the total savings
     resources = dcount(tostring(properties.resourceMetadata.resourceId)),
     savings = sum(todouble(properties.extendedProperties.savingsAmount))
     by
// ...for each recommendation type (solution)
     solution = tostring(properties.shortDescription.solution),
     currency = tostring(properties.extendedProperties.savingsCurrency)
//
// And lastly, format and sort the list
| project solution, resources, savings = bin(savings, 0.01), currency
| order by savings desc

Take this one step further using Logic Apps or Azure Functions and send out weekly emails to subscription and resource group owners. Or pivot this on resource ID and set up an approval workflow to automatically delete unused resources or downsize underutilized virtual machines. The sky’s the limit! To learn more, visit Query for Advisor data in Resource Graph Explorer. 

Four cost optimization strategies with Microsoft Azure

We’ve seen many businesses make significant shifts toward cloud computing in the last decade. The Microsoft Azure public cloud offers many benefits to companies, such as increased flexibility, scalability, and availability of resources. However, with the increased usage of resources, implementing best practices in cloud efficiency is a necessity to validate spending and avoid waste.

Paulo Annis explores how right-sizing, cleaning up resources, leveraging commitment-based discounts, and tuning databases and applications can help you achieve your optimization and efficiency goals in 4 cloud cost optimization strategies with Azure.

Please share these surveys with others involved in cost management and optimization and if you’re interested in participating in future research topics, we encourage you to join our research panel.

What’s new in Cost Management Labs

Of course, that’s not all. Every change in Microsoft Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it’s in the full Azure portal or Microsoft 365 admin center. 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 in the Microsoft Cloud

Six new and updated offers to help you save:

Lots of videos helping you manage and optimize costs this month:

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

Documentation updates

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

Want to keep an eye on all documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing documentation 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. You can also submit a GitHub issue. We welcome and appreciate all contributions!

What’s next?

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