Azure Cloud Cost Management

Azure Cost Management service is a build-in azure azure cost monitoring tool and cost management tool that gives user a brief usage and cost of azure resources within a azure subscription.

Cost Management + Billing Features:

  • Conduct billing administrative tasks such as paying your bill
  • Manage billing access to costs
  • Download cost and usage data that was used to generate your monthly invoice
  • Proactively apply data analysis to your costs
  • Set spending thresholds
  • Identify opportunities for workload changes that can optimize your spending

How to use Azure Cost Management Service?

Use Azure Cost Management Service from Azure Portal. To Check your Azure Subscription Spending rate and forecast or to use this service just follow the below steps.

Step 1: Login to Azure Portal with your Microsoft azure credentials.

Step 2: Access the Subscriptions and select your target azure subscription which you want to check the cost management.

Step 3: After choosing the target subscription select overview and select your service and click on view details to monitor a service.

With Azure Cost Management Service we can monitor the following:

  • Azure Subscription Spending rate and forecast
  • Costs by resource
  • Top used Azure products by number of resources
  • Azure Defender coverage

Azure Cost Management Use case:

Solution Overview: 

This Section presents an overview of  Azure cost management design and architecture. Currently  is using the PowerBI report for the cost management and  will continue to use PowerBI as an interim solution until Service Now is integrated with Cost management module. ServiceNow Cloud Management provides consistent, repeatable processes for creating and managing services across  Azure subscriptions and regions. Service Now Cloud billing gives  a summary of the ongoing costs for maintaining cloud resources.

Interim Solution:

Currently is using Power BI to connect to Azure and get in-depth data about  organization's Azure service usage. With this data  is creating custom reports and measures to better understand and analize Azure spending.

Power BI gives  more flexibility when it comes to reporting and customization,  will get into Azure Inventory and Usage Analysis, utilizing tags, MoM /YoY analysis, distributing the cost between departments.

Provides a date when the environment is expected to be removed by so that reporting can be done to confirm if an environment is still needed

Target Solution: Service Now cloud management dashboard centralizes  details on application services, compute utilization, data usage, and network loads for Azure cloud spending,  <<customer>> can determine cost information across time, service categories, providers, data centers, and users from a business service point of view.

Business hour scheduling and leasing for all new cloud requests with budget alerts to understand overall costs associated to users or groups. This provides cost transparency for <<customer>> to be able to optimize resource consumption based on defined budgets and quotas.

ServiceNow Cloud Management delivers unparalleled financial and operational visibility, giving  <<customer>> the reliable service and application-level information <<customer>> need to manage cloud usage and costs, create Show-Back and Charge-Back transparency, and ensure compliance with  <<customer>> corporate security policies.

<<customer>> can download billing data for Azure resources. The instance normalizes the data and saves it into a common cost table.

• Create a cloud billing schedule - Create a billing schedule to regularly download billing data from Azure to  <<customer>> instance.

• Control cloud billing data size - A system property is available to control the size of the cloud billing data that is sent from the MID Server to the ECC queue.

• Tags for cloud resources - Tags categorize cloud resources to provide more detailed tracking and billing report data.

Azure Tenent Build Overview : Azure management groups provide a way for an organization to control and manage access, compliance, and policies for their subscription within the tenant.

This section presents an overview of <Customer> low level design and architecture. For the solution, four management groups are used along with subscriptions specific to the management groups. 

In the proposed solution there are four Management Groups, they are: ITO, DA, PAAS, QIA Hub (Shared Services). Every management group has its own subscription(s). Both ITO and DA have Prod and Non-Prod subscriptions. PAAS has PAAS subscription and QIA Hub has both Shared Subscription and B2C subscription. Every subscription has Resource Groups, which contains all the related resources.

Management Groups: In order to manage the <Customer> subscriptions present in azure, it is necessary to have the management groups. Management Group is a collection of all the subscriptions and the policies related to it. All the <customer> specific subscriptions can be contained in the management group specific to that particular subscription.

Each and every condition which is applied to a Management Group will be applicable to the subscription(s) present in that management group.

Role Based Access Control (RBAC): Role Based Access control plays a very important role in managing the accessing of management groups efficiently. RBAC helps to properly differentiate the duties of a particular team, <Customer> users can access the Azure Resources, subscriptions, resource groups, depending on the roles assigned to them.

RBAC roles will be applied at every hierarchy and every resource present in that hierarchy will inherit those properties

Different kinds of RBAC roles representation:

For the <customer>, to control their strategy it is necessary to give them very less access rights to get their work done. Azure Active Directory can be created to assign various the user access to many teams.

Subscriptions: It serves as a single billing unit for Azure resources. In that services used in Azure are billed to a subscription. An Azure subscription is linked to a single account, the one that was used to create the subscription and is used for billing purposes.

The subscriptions which are used in this solution for the <customer> are as follows:

Prod Subscription Services - All the production related services will come into this subscription.

Non-Prod Subscription Services - All the non-prod services such as the services related to testing, development, integration, will come under this subscription.

PAAS Subscription Services - All the PAAS related services, will come under this subscription

Shared Subscription - All the services which are related to the Shared Services Infra Workloads will be under this subscription. Both Prod and Non-Prod will use Shared Subscription whenever required.

B2C - Business to Customer Infra workloads related services will be in this subscription

Resource Groups – A resource group contains all the resources.