With many companies wanting to move into the Cloud. Costing and monitoring of costs has become a particular point of interest especially with most services being paid for monthly. Azure like many other providers has its own built-in tool to help alert and monitor for costs reaching a certain point to avoid it spiralling out of control.
Budgets allow you to set a monthly amount but also an alert to notify you when reaching a certain percentage. Say we have one 1 VM and ideally we don’t want to spend more then £150 a month on the service, we can create a budget of £150 and configure it to alert us if the amount grows past 50% (£75).
Creating a Budget
- Head over to the Cost Management + Billing
- Select Cost Management from the left-hand side
- Again, on the left-hand menu select Budgets
- The main window of Budgets will show any existing Budgets. From here you can create a new Budget and also filter by subscription
- Clicking Add will bring you to the main window for creating a Budget. The first option allows you to change subscription if you have multiple subscriptions within Azure.
- Within the Budget Details and Amount will contain basic information about your Budget. For me, i normally change Reset Period to calendar Month instead of Billing month. I’ve configured my Budget to £150
- Clicking Next will take you onto the Set Alerts page. Enter a % which you want to be alerted and enter an email address which will be used to notify when the % threshold has been hit.
The Action Group option is used when you want to carry out additional tasks when the threshold is hit as I haven’t configured any Action Groups I will leaving this as None
- Selecting Create will validate and create the new Budget. After its finished, a new entry will be visible on the Budgets main page also showing how much of the budget has been used
