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.