What is Azure cost management + Billing?

 By using the Microsoft cloud, you can significantly improve the technical performance of your business workloads. It can also reduce your costs and the overhead required to manage organizational assets. However, the business opportunity creates a risk because of the potential for waste and inefficiencies that are introduced into your cloud deployments. Azure Cost Management + Billing is a suite of tools provided by Microsoft that help you analyze, manage, and optimize the costs of your workloads. Using the suite helps ensure that your organization is taking advantage of the benefits provided by the cloud.

You can think of your Azure workloads like the lights in your home. When you leave to go out for the day, are you leaving the lights on? Could you use different bulbs that are more efficient to help reduce your monthly energy bill? Do you have more lights in one room than are needed? You can use Azure Cost Management + Billing to apply a similar thought process to the workloads used by your organization.

With Azure products and services, you only pay for what you use. As you create and use Azure resources, you’re charged for the resources. Because of the deployment ease for new resources, the costs of your workloads can jump significantly without proper analysis and monitoring. You use Azure Cost Management + Billing features to:

• Conduct billing administrative tasks such as paying your bill
• Manage billing access to costs
• Download cost and usage data that was used to generate your monthly invoice
• Proactively apply data analysis to your costs
• Set spending thresholds
• Identify opportunities for workload changes that can optimize your spending

Understand Azure Billing

Azure Billing features are used to review your invoiced costs and manage access to billing information. In larger organizations, procurement and finance teams usually conduct Microsoft 365 Personal Billing tasks.

A billing account is created when you sign up to use Azure. You use your billing account to manage your invoices, payments, and track costs. You can have access to multiple billing accounts. For example, you might have signed up for Azure for your personal projects. So, you might have an individual Azure subscription with a billing account. You could also have access through your organization's Enterprise Agreement or Microsoft Customer Agreement. For each scenario, you would have a separate billing account.

Billing accounts

The Azure portal currently supports the following types of billing accounts:

• Microsoft Online Services Program: An individual billing account for a Microsoft Online Services Program is created when you sign up for Azure through the Azure website. For example, when you sign up for an Azure Free Account, account with pay-as-you-go rates or as a Visual studio subscriber.

• Enterprise Agreement: A billing account for an Enterprise Agreement is created when your organization signs an Enterprise Agreement (EA) to use Azure.

• Microsoft Customer Agreement: A billing account for a Microsoft Customer Agreement is created when your organization works with a Microsoft representative to sign a Microsoft Customer Agreement. Some customers in select regions, who sign up through the Azure website for an account with pay-as-you-go rates or upgrade their Azure Free Account may have a billing account for a Microsoft Customer Agreement as well.

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