Cloud costs can easily spiral out of control with simple administrative mistakes with temporary VM's being left on, misunderstanding storage costs, over provisioning and many more which can present serious problems when the Azure billing is invoiced. Azure budgets can be easily utilised at a subscription level to bring an element of cost control to your Azure estate, they can be scoped so they can be based on subscription, resource groups or a collection of resources and can be configured to trigger numerous types of alerts so you can address a small issue before it becomes a large issue with financial consequences.
This article shows you how to look at your monthly projected forecast, set a budget then setup a trigger to send an email based on a percentage of the budget.
Depending on how your design and how your company operates, you need to decide on where you want the budgets/alerts to be set, it is set on a scope normally at the subscription level but can be set at the resource group level, this example will set it at the subscription. Further information on scopes is here
Search for Subscriptions from the top bar, select your subscription, then select Cost Analysis from the subscription blade.
This will give you an idea of your current projected monthly spend for the subscription and gives you an idea of where you want to set your budget alerts if it falls outside of this projected range, it also services are costing you the most within your estate.
The image below shows the projected costs over the month of August is currently £9.23, allowing a small margin a budget alert could be set to trigger at £9.50 on a £10 budget for example.
To do this select Budgets from the Cost Management section on the left and click Add
Enter a descriptive name, select the reset period, an expiry date for when you want this budget alert to stop monitoring and expire then finally set your budget amount.
On the set alert screen, you can set the alert to trigger on a percentage of your budget. The example shown will trigger the alert when it hits 95% of the budget which with the budget being £10 this email alert will trigger at £9.50
To setup an alert action group select "manage action group" and create an alert, the example action group below is setup to send an email alert but this can be setup with SMS or Azure App push notifications etc.
Once created an email will arrive into your inbox if you trigger the alert conditions based on your parameters set which can then be dealt with internally before the issue costs your company money.