1. Cost management tools
Welcome back! In this video, we'll discuss cost management tools in more detail.
2. Cost management tools overview
There are three main tools used for cost management in Azure: the Pricing Calculator, the TCO calculator, and the Cost Management platform.
The Pricing Calculator is used to estimate the costs of a specific resource configuration in Azure.
The TCO Calculator is used to compare the total costs of on-premises infrastructure with the same configuration in Azure.
Cost Management provides users with insights and controls to monitor, analyze, and optimize costs.
We'll discuss each of these tools in more detail on the following slides.
3. Pricing Calculator
The Pricing Calculator is used to estimate the costs of a specific resource configuration in Azure.
It is freely available; you can also access it without logging in to Azure.
It will help you estimate the costs of single resources or a combination.
The Pricing Calculator also has template scenarios; for example, you can estimate the costs of a typical big data analytics set-up.
4. TCO calculator
TCO stands for total cost of ownership. It's an all-inclusive way to look at costs, including hidden costs like operating costs.
The TCO calculator helps you understand the costs of moving your on-premises infrastructure to Azure Cloud by comparing TCO costs for both.
Just like the Pricing Calculator, this tool is freely available as well.
It is typically used to support and prepare migration to Azure.
5. Cost Management
Cost Management can be considered the central hub in Azure for all things cost-related.
It allows you to set up budgets and cost alerts, manage billing options and invoices, and export cost details externally using an API.
To analyze costs, a specific tool is available within Cost Management: the Cost Analysis tool.
6. Cost Management: Cost Analysis tool
The Cost Analysis tool within the Cost Management platform is used primarily for ad-hoc cost exploration.
You can create custom visualizations and apply filters, for example, to analyze and visualize the costs of the previous month of all resources with a specific resource tag.
In addition, you can also create cost forecasts based on the available history of cost data.
For more advanced analysis, it is possible to export the cost data to Power BI, Microsoft's Business Intelligence software.
7. Example use case: costs of a virtual machine (cont.)
Let's go back to our previous use case, where we need to create a new virtual machine in Azure for our data project.
To estimate its costs, we would use the pricing calculator.
Azure also shows the cost per month as an additional reminder when we create the resource.
Once the VM is created, we can follow up on costs and usage using Cost Management.
8. Let's practice!
Let's practice with some exercises!