Overview
Cost Analyzer helps organizations reduce Azure spending, improve financial accountability, and operate cloud infrastructure more efficiently.
Business value
- Reduce Azure cloud costs through proactive monitoring and optimization
- Improve financial visibility across teams, subscriptions, and resource groups
- Automate cost-saving actions to minimize manual intervention
- Strengthen governance with structured reporting and audit-ready data
How it works
Cost Analyzer delivers value across five core areas.
1. Unified cost visibility
Consolidates Azure spending from Azure Cost Management into a single view, broken down by subscription, resource group, service, and time period. Finance teams, cloud administrators, and engineering leaders get a shared, real-time picture of where money is being spent.
2. Proactive budget monitoring
Alerts your team before costs exceed acceptable thresholds using budget planning and anomaly detection, so you can act early rather than discover overspend at the end of a billing cycle.
- Budget planner: define spending limits per cost group or subscription
- Anomaly detection: automatically flag unusual cost spikes
3. Intelligent optimization recommendations
Continuously surfaces actionable recommendations to reduce spend without compromising performance:
- Rightsizing: resize over-provisioned VMs and resources
- Azure Reservations: reduce long-term compute costs
- Azure Hybrid Benefits: maximize existing licensing investments
- Savings plans insights: track committed spend and identify gaps
- Other recommendations: identify idle and underutilized resources
4. Automated cost reduction
Schedules and Workflows let you automate cost-reduction tasks such as shutting down VMs during off-peak hours, terminating idle AVD sessions, and purging unused storage blobs, without manual intervention.
5. Structured reporting and governance
Configurable reports give stakeholders a clear view of spending trends, optimization progress, and cost allocation. Reports can be scheduled, shared, and exported for internal governance and financial reviews.