Whether you’re a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you’re spending, where it’s being spent, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Microsoft Cost Management comes in. 

We’re always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Microsoft Cost Management can help you better understand where you’re accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback: 

• Updates for Microsoft Azure pricing pages

• What is FinOps? 

• Help shape the future of cost reporting

• What’s new in Cost Management Labs

• New ways to save money with Microsoft Cloud

• New videos and learning opportunities

• Documentation updates

Let’s dig into the details. 

Updates for Microsoft Azure pricing pages  

We’re thrilled to announce some exciting changes to our Azure pricing experiences that will make it even easier for you to estimate the costs of your solutions. We’ve been hard at work, and we’re excited to share the following updates with you: 

• Azure Cognitive Services has been rebranded to Azure AI Services, which was announced at the Microsoft Inspire 2023 event. This change reflects our commitment to providing cutting-edge AI solutions to our customers. 

• We’ve launched pricing pages for two new Azure services: Azure Managed Lustre and Azure NAT Gateway. These services will help you better manage your data and network resources, respectively. 

• Two services went generally available: Microsoft Dev Box, and Microsoft Sentinel. You can find updated pricing and billing models on each of these pricing pages. 

• We’ve also added pricing information for new offers from a range of Azure services! Virtual Machines now have new BPsv2, Bsv2, and Basv2 series, and SQL Database has new DC-series HW vCore options. We’ve also added Archive High Priority Read and Retrieval offers to Azure Blob storage and Azure Data Lake storage, a new Recording “Unmixed Audio” offer to Azure Communication Services, new pricing for Prometheus metrics to Azure Monitor, a new v2 pricing model to Azure Stream Analytics, and a new Video Redaction feature to Azure Video Indexer. You can find many of these features on their respective services in the Azure pricing calculator.  

We’re committed to constantly improving our pricing tools and making them more accessible and user-friendly. We hope that these changes will help you estimate the costs of your Azure solutions with greater accuracy and ease. If you have any feedback or suggestions for future improvements, please let us know.

What is FinOps? 

FinOps is a discipline that combines financial management principles with cloud engineering and operations to provide organizations with a better understanding of their cloud spending. It also helps them make informed decisions on how to allocate and manage their cloud costs. The goal of FinOps isn’t to save money but to maximize revenue or business value through the cloud. It helps enable organizations to control cloud spending while maintaining the level of performance, reliability, and security needed to support their business operations.  

Learn how you can leverage the FinOps framework to drive cost management and optimization within your organization with our new FinOps documentation. And if you’re interested in other FinOps updates, see How Microsoft Cloud is embracing FinOps practitioners. 

Help shape the future of cloud Cost Management

Do you report on or manage costs for your team or organization? Do you need to group and organize costs across multiple subscriptions, resource groups, or billing accounts? We would love to get your feedback on the existing cost allocation feature in Cost Management through a survey that takes around 10 minutes.

Please feel free to share this with others in your organization. 

What’s new in Cost Management Labs 

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what’s coming in Microsoft 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: Currency selection in Cost analysis smart views—Now enabled by default in Cost Management Labs. 
  View your non-USD charges in USD or switch between the currencies you have charges in to view the total cost for that currency only. To change currency, select Customize at the top of the view and select the currency you would like to apply. Currency selection is not applicable to those with only USD charges. Currency selection is enabled by default in Cost Management Labs. If not enabled for you, enable currency selection from the Try preview menu. 

• Anomaly and reservation utilization alert rules. 
  Manage anomaly and reservation utilization alerts from the new Alert rules page. Anomaly detection alerts are available for all subscriptions and reservation utilization alerts are available for Enterprise Agreement billing accounts and Microsoft Customer Agreement billing profiles. You can enable the Alert rules page in Cost Management from the Try preview menu. 

• Drill down in Cost analysis smart views. 
  Drill into your cost data with one click using Cost analysis smart views. You can drill into a row to view the full details, view related resources from the context menu (three dots), open the resource to manage it from the Go to menu, remove filters using the Customize command, and use the Back command to undo a change. You can enable this option from the Try preview menu. 

• Streamlined Cost Management menu. 
  Organize Cost Management tools into related sections for reporting, monitoring, optimization, and configuration settings. You can enable this option from the Try preview menu. 

• Merge cost analysis menu items. 
  Only show one cost analysis item in the Cost Management menu. All classic and saved views are one click away, making them easier than ever to find and access. You can enable this option from the Try preview menu. 

• Recommendations view. 
  View a summary of cost recommendations that help you optimize your Azure resources in the Cost analysis preview. You can opt in using the Try preview menu. 

• Forecast in Cost analysis smart views. 
  Show your forecast cost for the period at the top of the Cost analysis preview. You can opt-in using Try preview. 

• Group related resources in Cost analysis smart views. 
  Group related resources, like disks under virtual machines or web apps under App Service plans, by adding a “cm-resource-parent” tag to the child resources with a value of the parent resource ID. 

• Charts in Cost analysis smart views. 
  View your daily or monthly cost over time in Cost analysis smart views. You can opt-in using Try Preview. 

• 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 resource. 

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 

Here are new and updated offers you might be interested in for cost optimization:

• Azure Managed Lustre now generally available

• Generally available: Autoscale Stream Analytics jobs

• Microsoft Dev Box is now generally available

• Generally available: Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage is now available in more regions

• General availability: Azure Archive Storage now available in Sweden Central

• Preview: Latest generation burstable VMs – Bsv2, Basv2, and Bpsv2

• Preview Updates: Azure Elastic SAN Public Preview improvements

• Preview: Azure Boost  

• Preview: Azure Dedicated Host – Resize  

New videos and learning opportunities 

Here is a new video on cost optimization you might be interested in: 

Maximize cloud value by optimizing your migration  

Follow the Microsoft Cost Management 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 Microsoft Cost Management. 

Documentation updates 

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

• New: FinOps documentation

• Updated: Azure EA agreements and amendments  

• Updated: View your Azure usage summary details and download reports for EA enrollments 

• Updated: Determine what Azure reservation you should purchase  

• Updated: Azure reservation recommendations 

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. 

Follow @MSCostMgmt 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 Microsoft Cost Management. 

Best wishes from the Microsoft Cost Management team.  

The post Microsoft Cost Management updates—July 2023 appeared first on Azure Blog.