Azure Cost Management

What it is

Azure Cost Management + Billing is the toolset for viewing, analyzing, and controlling Azure spend: Cost analysis, budgets, cost alerts, and export to build chargeback/finOps reports.

Why it exists

Cloud spend can sprawl. Cost Management gives administrators and finance teams visibility and governance — the “how much are we spending and where” answer that tags and scope make meaningful.

Key ideas

• Cost analysis — interactive, filterable view of costs by subscription/resource group/resource/tag; supports forecasts.
• Budgets — set a threshold (by amount, resource group, service) at daily/monthly scope with alert actions (email/automation/function) when exceeded.
• Cost alerts — budget-specific notification alerts (predefined templates like “budget threshold reached”).
• Costs are cumulative: costs roll up resource → resource group → subscription → management group.

How it fits (diagram)

Exam notes

• Spend analysis + budget alerts are the tested AZ-104 cost features.
• Tags enable meaningful cost grouping; without them, cost reporting is less useful.
• Exports to a storage account enable FinOps/chargeback automation.

Related

subscription · resource-tags · management-groups

📘 Source: Microsoft Learn — Azure Cost Management