In the introduction to this series, we listed the 4 high-level categories of Azure governance, namely resource organization, resource security, auditing, and cost.
In this part, we will focus on Cost Controls.
You can break Cost Controls down into the following sub-categories: Azure Cost Management, and Azure Advisor. Let’s explore each of these.
Azure Cost Management (aka Cloudyn)
Microsoft’s original cost management consisted of only a breakdown of costs by resource and spending rate/
But, on June 29, 2017
Since then, Cloudyn has been re-branded (at least in the Azure portal) as “Azure Cost Management”. With it, we get reporting, dashboards, budgets, optimizations, etc.
As is the process when
The documentation has some good tutorials on reviewing usage and costs, forecasting spending, optimizing, and controlling access to data.
Azure Advisor

Azure
To get an idea of what type of cost recommendations there are, check out the documentation here.
There’s not a lot to say about Azure Advisor. I personally expect to see the service’s components decoupled from the Advisor service itself (and Azure Advisor to eventually be discontinued), and brought under a more unified service.
Case in point, the Security “recommendations” are literally just a pointer to Azure Security Center’s
Regardless, I did include Azure Advisor within my Azure Monitoring Tools Explained series as well, in case you would like to read about some further examples of use.
Here’s an Introduction to Azure Advisor to get you started.
Now that we’ve covered all 4 high-level categories, namely resource organization, resource security, auditing, and cost, let’s summarize everything.