How to save $692 in Microsoft Azure with a few simple steps and lower your Cloud bill

Today I am going to show you how easy it is to find and remove Azure resources that do not need to be running, thereby saving you money and making you the hero in your company.

I'll be doing this on the CloudMonitor demo site - you can try it here live and follow along: AI-Driven Recommendations ? CloudMonitor

Firstly, let's check the Executive Summary to see how our costs are doing. As you can see, our costs have increased drastically in June, 2021! It's hard to know what caused it though...

It looks like we have 4 Cost Recommendations to implement that could reduce our cloud bill by $1k a month! Click on that 4 to take us to the Recommendations Report and see what they are.

Here we can see that on the 22nd of we have an Abandoned VM Disk. This often happens when someone deletes a Virtual Machine and forgets to delete the associated resources, like the Disk. This can get expensive fast as it is costing $692 a month...

Looks like Rodney is the Owner of the resource, so we have someone to talk to and find out more about this particular resource. We could also go to the Resource Group Owner.

Right-click on the Resource to Drillthrough so we can have a look in more detail.

This report gives us a lot of useful information about the Virtual Machine disk. It was created on June the 1st by Rodney Joyce, who also happens to be the Owner.

The Cost Tab shows more information about the Meter and type of resource. In this case, we can see it is a P50 Disk.

The other tabs are as follows - you can explore them on your own:

• Recommendations - the Recommendations related to this resource
• Cost Anomalies - Any unusual or sudden cost spikes for this resource (up or down)
• Tags - The tags in Azure for this resource
• Audit Log - A history of the decisions and actions taken for this resource
• Cost Analysis - An interactive tool to dig into the costs for this resource by various metrics.

You can click on the various tabs to see more info about this resource or click on "Open in Azure" to see it in the Azure Portal - we can do this to verify that it is indeed an Abandoned Disk and has zero load on it... so why should we pay $692 a month for it?

Just to prove I am not making this up, let's switch to Cost Management in Azure and check the cost of that Resource Group. There is it - $22.68 per day! Sigh.

Ok, so CloudMonitor has recommended that we delete this, however, it's probably wise to check with the Resource Owner and find out if there is a good reason not to. We'll also want to capture their response and our decision before proceeding in the name of good governance!

So let's switch over to the CloudMonitor Admin App and find the same Recommendation so that we can ask Rodney if this Abandoned Disk can be deleted!

If you go back to the Audit History you will notice that this conversation was captured against the resource. No more digging through emails, Teams messages and other channels to find out the decisions that were taken your Azure resources! The Owner (or Recipient) will be notified of a new message and can reply in Cloud Monitor.

After the Owner has replied - let's check back in the Audit Log to make sure that this decision is captured forever.

Good. Now we can open up Azure and delete the Abandoned Disk. Check in to Cloud Monitor the next day and you will see that the Recommendation will be Completed and the cost will have dropped.

That's all we have time for now - in the next demo we will show you how to track down Cost Anomalies and find the people in your Team who spend the most on Azure... probably without even realising it!

Visit https://CloudMonitor.ai to sign up. With over 50 AI-driven Recommendations, Cost Anamolies, Schedule Reports and many other features you will save a lot of money.

To try the live demo go to: AI-Driven Recommendations ? CloudMonitor