Cost Monitoring

Introduction

Monitors in Cost Analyzer allows users to define a budget for their Azure cost on a monthly or daily basis and get notified if the actual cost reached the budget.

Add a Monitor

To create a Cost Monitor, the user must first create a Cost Management Group. Navigate to Monitoring and click Configure monitor. Provide the basic details including monitor name and description, if required.

Time interval

• Choose between the Daily, Monthly and Last 7 days options to run the monitor for the specified time interval.
• Daily can be chosen when there is a need to monitor the daily cost of the filtered resources.
• Monthly can be chosen when there is a need to monitor the total cost of the filtered resources spent on the current calender month.
• Last 7 days can be chosen when the user has the necessity to monitor the Azure cost for the past 7 days.

Monitoring rules

• The next step is to configure rules for monitoring. Clicking on the Add rule button opens a sub window to configure rules to the Monitor. The rules configuration include 3 different steps to complete the process of creating a monitor

Basic Details

• Provide a name to the monitoring rule and choose the subscriptions that are to be monitored.

• The cost metric can be chosen between Actual cost and Amortized cost.

Filters

• Apply the required filters so that only the cost of the required criteria is considered while checking for violation.

Budget

• Set a budget value that will be used to determine a violation.
  An alert will be sent when the actual budget exceeds the provided budget value of the rule.

• The budget value can be given as a static value or as a dynamic budget difference value, which determines the budget change by comparing it to the previous day's budget value.

Monitoring alerts

• Configure the required email address(es) to which the alert(s) are to be sent when a monitoring rule is violated.

• Users can also choose the required notification channels to receive an alert notification.

The following illustration displays the process of creating a monitor in a Cost Management Group:

Update existing monitoring configuration

• Monitors created can be updated further by clicking on the respective monitor name or by using Edit option for the corresponding Monitor from the Monitoring section.

• The monitor name/description can also be updated using the Rename option available next to the Monitor name/description.

Controlling Monitor state

• Users can Enable (or) Disable a Monitor from the Monitoring section of the corresponding Cost Management Group.

Remove a Monitor

• Any monitor that is no longer useful can be removed completely from the Monitoring section in a Cost Management Group by clicking the Delete icon next to it.

Status calendar

• Users can access the historical summary of the Cost Analyzer's cost alert status in the form of a calendar. Data for the last 30 days will be always available to users for reference.

Alert history

• Users can find the cost alerts from the Alert history tab present in each monitor.

• The alert details can be found by clicking the Details hyperlink available next to each cost alert.

• If the Notification channel fails to transmit the generated alerts, those alerts will be captured in Alert history with the Transmission status marked as Failure and the Failure Reason can be found by clicking on the red info icon.

Filtering

• Users can filter cost alerts based on Date, Channel type, and Transmission status.