Azure Cost Management Zero to Hero

If you are reading this page then you probably have issues with your Azure bill. You or your organization may feel some of the following things:

• The bill just keeps getting bigger
• We seem to go around in circles looking to do something about the Azure spend but nothing really happens
• We feel like there is a lot of waste in to our Azure spend
• We feel out of control of our spend and are concerned about how we manage the risk

We recognize that many organizations struggle with how to start tackling the cost management challenge of cloud spending and in this article we will look try and help you go from Zero to Hero so cost management is a strength and advantage.

If we are going to execute an initiative to try and improve our cost management processes then we need think about how we will measure success. This can be both tangible and intangible measures. Tangible measures are often best because they can be explicitly measured but do not underestimate the importance of intangible measures too. If people feel like costs are in control, they are transparent and we are making good decisions then people will have confidence in the tools and processes we use for Cost Management which is also very important.

Its important to remember that a Marco-level measure of reducing your overall cloud spend may not be the best measure. You will probably find that various teams in the organization are changing things and deploying new applications and you might make a good cost saving in one team which at the top level is wiped out by another project in a different team that added a new cloud application. Some good measures would involve things like:

• Can we break down costs into manageable chunks and then get visibility and tracking of costs with those scopes (eg, Team, Application, Department)
• Can we allocate our costs to different Teams, Applications, Departments effectively
• Can we measure our waste and show that we have reduced it
• Can we show that we can identify unexpected spend and act on it quickly
• Do we feel like we are confident in our cost management

One of the most important activities in your initiative is to communicate your success. With Turbo360 you will easily be able to see graphs and data showing cost improvements but also you should share stories about some of the cost related changes you make.

• Share an internal blog about your first success
• Communicate monthly some of the key changes to management
• Show the charts which show the impact on costs

In the rest of this journey we will show you how to use Turbo360 to help you go from Zero to Hero with Cost Management.

Turbo360 is available with a 15 day free trial if you would like to try it

To help you learn more about some of the things which will help you accelerate a Zero to Hero initiative for Cost Management check out some of the resources below:

• FinOps Accountability Whitepaper
• Azure Cost Savings Proven Techniques with Turbo360 for Kovai

In order to tackle the cost management challenge we near to break things up and let the teams who run an application take ownership of the costs and cost optimizations. This is one of the foundation principals of success.

In Turbo360 we will allow you to build a tree view so you can group cost into departments, products, teams, environments and then you can provide access to those areas so that your teams have transparency on the costs they incur.

This is a significant step forwards in changing the culture of the organization towards a cost conscious culture.

We now need to make it simple for users to be able to see where the money is spent without the user needing to be an Azure expert. Turbo360 provides a simple feature to view the cost data in different dimensions.

When performing analysis of your billing data you might find something interesting and need to dig deeper. In Turbo360 we have a click through feature which allows you to expand a graph to dig into the data via additional insights so that its easy for you to explore interesting things that you see.

Often you will need to compare time periods to look for the change in patterns of cost. In Turbo360 its easy to look at a comparison of costs, for example comparing this month versus last month. These kind of insights help you spot patterns in costs as your applications grow.

Monitoring costs are a key to mitigating risks associated with cloud costs. The challenge with cloud costs is that it is a bit like a credit card where you consume resources and spend money and then get the bill at the end of the month.

You may have many people in teams in the organization who are consuming resources from the cloud and spending money but you don’t always know what has been spent until later.

If someone accidently misconfigured a resource and spend more money that you expected, how long would it take you to notice?

If you get alerts from your monitoring you should also consider how you would like to receive the alerts. Do you just need an email or teams message to let your team know, or do you need something more formal like a help desk ticket in Service Now.

In Turbo360 we have a feature which allows you to set an expected spend per month or day and you can then configure getting alerts when you hit that threshold.

With the democratization of cost that we discussed earlier in this journey, you can configure monitoring for different teams and applications and they get more granular alerts but it is much easier to configure.

You can see below how we would get an alert when we hit the red threshold

In addition to monitoring overall costs, you may also have changes in costs at a lower level which are outside of the typical pattern. These anomalies are sometimes difficult to identify as you might make savings in one area which are wiped out by increases in another. The anomaly detection alerts in Turbo360 will help you identify resources where the cost increase is different to the typical spend.

In addition to alerts when something is going wrong, its also important to stay informed about what’s happening with your costs. Turbo360 provides notifications which will help you achieve the increase in confidence about costs by providing transparency and information about what is happening.

Doing cost reviews is very important otherwise how would you know if your spending money wisely. The challenge with cost reviews are that they are difficult to do. You either have challenges getting the data you need or it is very time consuming and as result they are not done.

Turbo360 aims to make it easy to see the information you need to do a cost review and to allow this to be something your teams can do quickly and regularly.

For companies struggling with Cost Management, cost reviews are often a top down activity triggered by senior management dissatisfaction with the cloud bill. With Turbo360 we want to make cost reviews easy for teams to do quickly and regularly.

It should be a good practice to review your teams costs at least once per month. When your costs are stable and you are confident with your monitoring tools then you might do cost reviews less frequently and in areas in the organization where things are changing rapidly you may choose to do cost reviews more frequently.

Many of our partners incorporate cost reviews into their end of sprint activities. This lets them identify issues and act upon then early in the project life cycle.

The following resources provide more info to help you learn more about doing cost reviews with Turbo360:

• FinOps Accountability Whitepaper
• Cost Reviews

Rightsizing is about looking at the resources you have and checking they are appropriately configured and sized for the work they do. Many customers deploy applications and then move onto the next project and never look back and review if the resources are providing value for money. This is one of the biggest causes of waste in your cloud spend.

In Turbo360 we will help you identify rightsizing opportunities also make recommendations within the scope of the teams managing the applications to help ensure they aren’t missed. Turbo360 will also give you the information to help evaluate and validate a recommendation.

Reservations provide the opportunity for customers to commit to Microsoft that they will provide predictable demand for a resource type and then get a discount for that. Many customers miss the opportunity to use reservations.

Turbo360 will help you to see resources which could leverage a reservation and also to ensure that the reservations that you have are fully utilized.

Often you can not execute the change to optimize a resource straight away. You need to plan an activity to do some analysis and to follow a change process before the change can be made.

In Turbo360 you can identify a cost optimization and you can then push the recommendation to common work tracking systems such as creating a work item in Azure DevOps or creating a ticket in Service Now. This will help you to track work and get an SLA on your optimizations being implemented.

Many workloads can be turned off or scaled down at times when they aren’t used. It often takes a complex DevOps skill set to identify these resources and then to build an automation to perform the required actions. This can be a huge effort at scale.

Turbo360 has a scheduler feature which makes it easy to configure time windows and then associate resource actions to them. A good example would be to turn off all my virtual machines in the UAT environment at the end of the day.

Turbo360 will help you a lot here, each node on the tree view can have multiple schedules. This allows you to democratize managing the schedules to the teams who run each application.

If you have followed the Cost Management Zero to Hero journey using Turbo360 then at this point you should have found that you were able to make significant progress in getting transparency on your Azure costs.

• You have also got others involved in managing their costs too.
• We mitigated risks through simple to maintain monitoring.
• We identified cost optimizations and implemented them.

You should now be seen as a cost management champion by your organization. If you followed the suggestions at the start of the journey about communicating your success then you find people in other teams taking an interest in what you are doing with cost management.

You can not start thinking of things like a cost management centre for excellence to help provide support to other teams.

Ideally you will have had some senior management support at the start of this initiative which makes things a lot easier. Even if you didn’t have any senior stakeholders involved, you should be able to demonstrate tangible benefits that you achieved through the journey by measuring costs and identify and implementing savings.

You should be able to demonstrate how the organization can feel in control of costs. This should help you get support from senior stakeholders to take the initiative further.

As you went through the Zero to Hero journey you will have been beginning to adopt some of the good practices which are part of the FinOps discipline. You may not haven realized that you have been doing FinOps. We would hope that Turbo360 made it easier for you to adopt these good practices.

If you check out the FinOps Foundations Maturity Model you should find we got up from the ground, begin crawling and then went through to walking. If you continue improving and look at some more of the practices within FinOps you will be able to get even better.

Sometimes a customer needs an external party to help their teams implement some of the changes or to work with them on culture changes or to provide accountability to the customer to ensure that the cost management activities are performed.

At Turbo360 we have a number of partners who specialise in using our products to work with customers who need some additional help beyond a tool to drive the transformation the organization needs. To check out more on our partners click here

If you found this guide useful, we have a number of other resources which you might find helpful in learning more about Azure cost management:

• FinOps on Azure Podcast
• Cost Management Playbook
• Tutorial videos for Turbo360 Cost Management