Learning centre
Azure cost management guides
Practical, evidence-led guides to understanding your Azure bill and checking the assumptions behind your cloud budget. 23 guides across 5 topics.
Cost troubleshooting
How to investigate an Azure cost spike
Find why your Azure bill increased: align billing periods, compare services, drill into resources and separate reservation payments from usage growth.
Read guideCompare an Azure Pricing Calculator estimate with your bill
Reconcile an Azure BOQ or Pricing Calculator estimate with actual costs by matching resources, periods, usage assumptions and billing rates.
Read guideUnderstand Azure bandwidth and data transfer charges
Trace Azure data transfer costs by service, region and meter, distinguish network processing fees, and investigate unexpected bandwidth increases.
Read guideWhy an Azure VM costs more than the VM price
A virtual machine bill combines compute, licensing, disks, snapshots, IP addresses, bandwidth and backup. Learn to read every meter behind one VM.
Read guideWhy Azure Storage costs keep growing
Understand Azure Storage billing: capacity, access tiers, transactions, redundancy, snapshots, versioning and soft delete, and how to investigate steady growth.
Read guideUnderstand Azure Backup and Site Recovery charges
Review Azure Backup billing: protected instances, backup storage, retention, redundancy and restore points, plus how recovery services affect your monthly cost.
Read guideControl Azure Monitor and Log Analytics costs
Reduce log ingestion and retention charges by reviewing data sources, table plans, sampling, diagnostic settings and retention against real operational need.
Read guideCommitments
Azure Actual cost vs Amortized cost explained
Understand Azure reservation charges, upfront purchases, amortized allocation and unused benefits so you can compare cloud costs on the right basis.
Read guideAzure reservations vs savings plans: how to choose
Compare Azure reservations and savings plans by flexibility, scope, eligible services and commitment risk, and decide which fits a workload you can predict.
Read guidePlan for Azure reservation expiry before it costs you
Track reservation and savings plan end dates, review utilization and workload plans, and decide whether to renew, resize, exchange or let a commitment lapse.
Read guideOptimization
Find idle and orphaned Azure resources that still cost money
Review unattached disks, snapshots, public IPs and idle workloads. Confirm ownership, dependencies and billing before retiring Azure resources.
Read guideRightsize Azure virtual machines using utilization data
Assess Azure VM CPU, memory, storage and network demand, compare compatible sizes, and validate performance and savings after a resize.
Read guideOptimize Azure managed disk costs
Review disk tiers, provisioned capacity, performance settings, snapshots and unattached disks to reduce Azure storage spend without risking workload performance.
Read guideSchedule Azure VMs to cut non-production cost
Use start and stop schedules for development and test workloads, and understand what continues to bill while a virtual machine is deallocated.
Read guideReduce Azure development and test environment costs
Control non-production Azure spend with sizing, scheduling, retention, environment lifecycle rules and clear ownership, without slowing delivery teams down.
Read guideProduct guides
A monthly Azure cost review checklist for cloud teams
Run a repeatable Azure cost review: confirm billing completeness, explain variance, review commitments, assign actions and measure realized savings.
Read guideAllocate Azure costs to teams with tags and scopes
Design a tagging and scope strategy that makes Azure cost attributable to teams, products and environments, and keep it accurate over time.
Read guideAzure cost data freshness, latency and accuracy
Understand why Azure cost figures change after the fact, how reporting latency works, and how to compare reports and invoices without drawing wrong conclusions.
Read guideAzure permissions needed for cost and estate reporting
Understand the Azure roles and directory permissions behind cost, inventory, activity and access reports, and what each report can show without them.
Read guideSet Azure budgets and cost alerts that people act on
Configure Azure budgets at the right scope, choose thresholds with owners, and turn alerts into a response process instead of ignored notifications.
Read guideService guides
Understand and reduce Azure SQL Database costs
Review Azure SQL purchasing models, service tiers, storage, backup retention and idle databases to explain and control your database spend.
Read guideUnderstand Azure Kubernetes Service costs
Break down AKS spend across node pools, disks, load balancers, egress, logging and scaling behaviour, and attribute cluster cost to workloads.
Read guideUnderstand Azure App Service costs
Review App Service plans, instance counts, scaling rules, slots, certificates and supporting services to explain and reduce web application spend.
Read guide