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

A Cost Management Group is required initially to set up a Cost Monitor.

1. Navigate to Monitoring section in a Cost group and click Add / Configure Monitor
2. Enter a name to the monitor

Time interval

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

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

Budget

7. Set a budget value that will be used to determine a violation
8. Click Next to proceed

• 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

9. Select the desired escalation policy that contains rules that meets the business needs
10. Click Add to finish creating the Cost Monitor

• The notification channel selection and mail configuration can be customized.

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

Update existing monitoring configuration

1. Go to Monitoring section in a Cost group. The user will be displayed with the list of available monitors
2. Click the Edit icon next to any monitor that is to be updated
3. Perform the required changes
4. Click Update

Controlling Monitor state

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

Alert incidents

• Alerts identified by Serverless360 monitoring will be created as Incidents, and they can be resolved at anytime.

• Users can view the list of alert incidents generated for a Cost Monitor in the following section: Monitoring->Incidents.

• The details of the incidents can be accessed by clicking the state.

Resolving incidents

An alert incident can be changed to any of the following states:

• Open - when there are violations in an incident
• Acknowledge - when the user intends to investigate the violations
• Close - when the user believes that the violations are resolved and the alert incident is no longer useful
• Reopen - when the user feels that the incident is still problematic

The incident state can be changed individually by selecting the respective option in the context menu (or) be changed in bulk by selecting the required incidents and choosing the respective option from the Actions dropdown.

Tracking user actions

By choosing the view user actions option from the context menu of an incident, it is possible to track every user action detail for an alert incident. The information includes the user's information, the time the action was taken, and the change in incident state.

Notification history

• The details of notification channels for each transmitted alert can be viewed by selecting view notification details option from the context menu of an incident.

• If a Notification channel transmission is failed, the reason for failure will be available against the alert.

Filtering

Following options are available to filter the incidents:

• Incident Status
• Date

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.

Remove a Monitor

1. Go to Monitoring section in a Cost group. The user will be displayed with the list of available monitors
2. Click the Delete icon next to any monitor that is to be deleted
3. Click Delete in the confirmation box