Using Tagging to Get Better Visibility in Azure Costs

We are all aware that Azure offers enterprises the versatility and mobility needed to expand their operations and IT architecture on the cloud. However, it becomes exceedingly challenging and laborious to monitor every commodity in fluid Azure systems as the development and utilization of resources rise.

In the worst situation, your engineers and IT administrators can be setting up and managing additional resources without your knowledge until their associated expenditures jarringly appear in your monthly invoices.

To prevent such bill shocks, it’s critical to develop a sound tagging strategy throughout your cloud and apply Azure tagging best practices for effective resource and expense administration.

What is Azure Tagging?

What is Azure Tagging?

Name-value combinations known as MS Azure tags are used to thematically categorize assets, specify additional metadata as a feature of the item, and give users a clearer picture of a particular cloud subscription. Tags may be assigned to specific Azure Resource Manager-created components or, more commonly, to the entire resource group to which they belong. The tagging is carried out at the Azure system level; therefore, it has no effect whatsoever on the connected resources’ efficiency. The function is also free.

 

The name-value combinations that make up the metadata can include anything that aids in identifying the category to which a given commodity is expected to belong. 

 

For instance, the value of a resource tag key may be “Engineering,” and the key could be “Department.” Although they can be changed at any moment, it’s preferable to use uniform tags when creating resources to prevent ambiguity and extra work connected with their efficiency. In this manner, you will be capable of quickly identifying all of the assets that fall under specific units, financial pools, operational environments, etc., by sorting your assets in the Azure portal with tags. 

 

Common Tags 

IT managers must organize cloud-based resources to ensure all implementations are straightforward. You can tag in a fundamental or comprehensive way by employing various azure tagging strategies. It can assist IT teams in managing cloud operations or integrating data relevant to every facet of the company. Following that, here is a list of tags that businesses frequently employ.

 

  • Environment
  • Owner 
  • Cost Center
  • BusinessUnit
  • Department
  • Client
  • Application
  • DataClassification
  • Workload
  • Management

 

The Benefits of Tagging in Azure

The Benefits of Tagging in Azure

The benefits of tagging your Azure costs are that you can more easily track and control your spending, which is one of the reasons why it’s a key part of FinOps (Financial Operations). When you have a clear understanding of where your money is being spent, you can make more informed decisions about how to allocate your resources. Azure Tagging can also help you optimize your Azure spending by identifying areas where you may be able to reduce or eliminate unnecessary costs. The benefits of azure tagging resources include the following:

 

  • Resource management: Your IT staff would be able to easily find resources that are connected to particular processes, settings, control units, or other crucial data. Classifying organizational roles and privileged access for management systems depends on the organization of the resources.
  • Cost management and optimization: Empower IT to comprehend the assets and applications that each team utilizes in order to make business groups conscious of the usage of cloud services.
  • Operations management: A key component of ongoing operations for the operations executive team is transparency on business obligations and SLAs. Operations can be managed for mission severity using tags.

Conclusion 

Tagging your Azure expenses can improve your understanding of your expenditures and allow you to utilize your assets more wisely. Tagging is an excellent place to start if you’re seeking strategies to optimize your Azure spending. By using clear metadata tagging rules, you can arrange your cloud resources to satisfy legislative, strategic efficiency, and financial constraints. This makes it easier to find and utilize resources.

Request a demo on our website to find out more about managing Azure resources to cap your cloud spending effectively.

4 Tips to Upgrade Your Azure Financial Reporting

If you’re like most organizations these days, you’re utilizing Azure to power at least a portion of your operations. Additionally, if you use Azure, you are aware of how crucial it is to keep a close check on your expenses, as it’s a constant struggle to avoid paying more than you need to. Here are a few tips and recommendations on how you can upgrade your Azure financial reporting and develop strong FinOps (Financial Operations) for your company so that you can maximize savings and get the most out of your investment.

Look at Your Costs on a Rolling 30-Day Period

1. Look at Your Costs on a Rolling 30-Day Period

One of the finest techniques for keeping track of your Azure costs is to look at them on a rolling 30-day period. This way, you can spot trends and optimize your usage accordingly. You can search for patterns and adjust the way you employ services. You can also use this method to compare your current month’s usage to previous months so that you can see if you’re making progress in terms of efficiency.

A 30-day period is an ideal number to follow for ensuring consistency in cost assessment. This is because most managers prefer having cost comparisons on a month-to-month basis. Further, typical Azure reports are produced monthly, which is another factor to consider. However, months can have 28 days, 30 days, or 31 days which can cause inconsistency when comparing costs. Hence taking an average,  a rolling 30-day period seems to be a reasonable period of time to follow.

It should be noted that your Log Analytics workspaces and Application Insights services often incur the most expenses through data import and maintenance. Through a 30-day rolling period, you will be able to accurately determine how much of the Azure budget is being spent on insight and other Azure services. 

One popular tactic is to activate supervision for a small subset of resources, then use the calculators and the observed data levels to estimate your expenditures for the entire ecosystem.

2. Remove FX (Foreign Exchange) from the Reporting  

If you have multiple subscriptions in different currencies, it can be helpful to remove foreign exchange (FX) from the reporting and solely report in a single currency (USD). This will make it easier for you to compare your costs across different time periods and see how exchange rates are affecting your spending. It will also help you track your costs more accurately since currency fluctuations can sometimes distort the data.

Remove FX (Foreign Exchange) from the Reporting

3. Associate Costs To Match Where “Value” is Being Achieved

Another way to upgrade your Azure financial reporting is to associate costs with customers, departments, etc. This will help you match your costs with the areas of your business that are actually generating value. For example, if you have a department that is responsible for generating revenue, you’ll want to make sure that its costs are properly reflected in the overall financial picture. By doing this, you can get a better understanding of where your money is going and how it is being used.

You can further associate cost with revenue to create a “unit economic” Key Performance Indicator (KPI) on a per workload/RSS-group level. By doing this, you can track how much each unit is costing you and compare it to the revenue that it is generating. This will help you make better decisions about where to allocate your resources and identify areas where additional investment might be needed.

4. Use FinOps (Financial (Cloud) Operations) to Enhance Financial Reporting

Finally, one last tip for upgrading your Azure financial reporting is to utilize FinOps’ benefits. And what is FinOps? The administration technique known as FinOps, or financial operations, encourages collaborative accountability for an organization’s cloud infrastructure deployment and expenditures.

The FinOps  methodology brings together leadership from the finance, IT, and DevOps sectors to control the overall cost of cloud platforms across an organization. With FinOps, an organization gives cross-functional teams the authority to control cloud costs while functioning according to FinOps standards. In order to implement the best practices for cloud financial planning, the FinOps initiative frequently involves setting up governance structures with a team or council.

Use FinOps (Financial (Cloud) Operations) to Enhance Financial Reporting

Four steps can be taken to implement a FinOps structure:

  • Analysis. Monitor all cloud spending and gain insight into team-specific IT expenditures and allotment.
  • Benchmarking. Evaluate cloud instance efficiency to identify over- and underprovisioning.
  • Optimization. To enhance cost/performance, rightsize instances, shift loads, and tweak applications.
  • Negotiation. Streamline your cloud service provider (CSP) payments and match your overall performance with cloud service allocation.

To preserve productivity, spur innovation, upgrade financial reporting, and reduce costs, you have to perform these processes on a regular basis.

 

Conclusion

Azure offers organizations a robust framework for managing their operations, but it’s crucial to monitor expenditures to prevent out-of-control spending. You may improve your Azure financial reporting by using the aforementioned advice so that you have a proper insight into where your money is invested and how it is being used. This information will help you make informed decisions about where to allocate resources and invest in new technologies.

Managing your Azure costs can become a little complicated. Hence, our experts are here to assist you in managing all your Azure costs with ease. So, if you’re looking for ways to cut Azure spending, request a demo on our website to find out how much you can save.