Azure cost analysis alternatives
As part of our series, we’ll look into the real-time challenges in allocating and analysis of Azure cost data.? If we start to look at the cost analysis and allocation features within ACM, you will find it’s not that difficult to do a basic graph of some element of cost.?Below is an example of a typical graph.?
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The challenge with ACM is the feature is tied into the Azure Portal model.? From a user perspective its painful to navigate, create useful graphs and then remember where they are next time.? That is the feedback we get from most Azure experts, now imagine if you are not an Azure expert, you may be an IT manager responsible for several applications or a developer/admin who is a little Azure aware. The user interface is going to be challenging for you to get the data you need and be productive with it.?
When you create a graph in ACM you can save it as a shared view as shown below.?
The saved view is in the context of the scope you selected.? This means it is now back to the constraints we discussed earlier where the data is tied to the deployment model so you are either looking at:?
For some customers you may have a model where you have few subscriptions with many resource groups belonging to different teams.? At this point creating views for just your resources is going to get difficult and you are going to have a lot of shared views confusing everyone in the above picture.?
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In Turbo360, each of your nodes on the tree can be scoped to teams and then you can have sub-nodes for different areas that team care about.? This aligns well with the FinOps principal of getting the teams who incur the cost to own the cost.? You can see below that my integration team example shows the analysis tab on their team, and I can create some common views to be shared by that team.?
The interface is very intuitive and easy for non-Azure experts to create and review graphs.?
Looking past the basic graphs, there are also views of the data in Turbo360 which allow you to easily compare spend this month to the equivalent last month.? This is especially useful when comparing how things are going.?
With Turbo360 we are also trying to promote transparency of cost.? There is a Role-based Access Control (RBAC) model which controls permissions to the data in the tree view, but we think it should be easy for the management of teams and applications to be able to come into the tool and check how their applications are performing from a cost perspective.? Imagine you are the product owner for the partner portal website.???
Rather than waiting until the Azure Admin exports data to excel or shared reports based on data in ACM, you should be able to check the costs for your application whenever you want. The same should be true for engineers.? This is how we encourage cost to be part of the conversation from early in the application lifecycle, rather than waiting until 6 months after going live.?
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