Azure usage insights

I have been working lately with Azure Cost Management, exploring it's features. Indeed, it is a great tool when comes to viewing cost related details and filtering your resources, grouping them and having nice visualizations out-of-the-box. Since it was initially built to display EA ( or PAYG pricing ), it becomes a bit tricky when you want to get some insights about resource consumption itself behind the pricing.

The data is there, but it is not yet ( at the moment of writing this article ) displayed at ACM dashboard and you also don't have possibility to filter on quantity consumed. So, in order to get "Quantity of resource consumed", "Unit of Measure" and all other additional Usage details, you can setup export to storage account. There is another option to connect it with Azure Cost Management connector to Power BI, but in this article I will cover only export part.

On top of ACM dashboard, click on "Download" and set Export schedule. It will create export file to Storage account.

Make sure you run it once created, otherwise it will only be run upon specified schedule. You are in control of export schedule as ACM Contributor. Keep in mind, it may take up until 1 hour for export to appear in storage account ( depending on size of report )

Once you have the export in Storage account, you can download it and import in Power Bi for further customizations. The file will include a lot of parameters, that will be displayed on the right side as fields. You can choose amongst them ( ResourceGroup, Quantity, MeterSubCategory, MeterCategory and UnitofMeasure ). These fields will give you insights about consumption per resource, SKU, resource group, each with its own unit of measure

To summarize, export gives you possibility to extract extra insights about resources. There are couple of Power BI template apps available as well, mainly for EA customers at this time.

This article is representing my personal point of view and not the view of the company I am working at. I am remaining open for comments, suggestions and remarks. I hope it helps audience to get a better idea of usage reports that can be fetched out of ACM.

Thank you for reading!