Cost management - compare different periods

Question

Cost management - compare different periods

Mohamed Roushdy 66

Hello,

is it possible in Azure Cost Management to create a dashboard or a report to compare different periods? for example, compare this week to the same week last month, or this month to the same month last year, etc.

Best Regards,

Sadiqh Ahmed 49,571 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2023-07-06T07:02:40.3966667+00:00
Hello @Mohamed Roushdy Thank you for reaching out to us on Microsoft Q&A platform. Happy to help!

I understand your requirement for creating dashboard or a report to compare different periods.

Comparison reports are not available natively. You can consider creating custom report through offline tooling. Azure Cost Management provides a set of APIs that you can use to retrieve cost and usage data for your Azure subscriptions. You can use these APIs to extract the data and then use a tool like Power BI or Excel to create custom reports.

Here are the high-level steps to create a custom report using offline tooling:

Get an Azure AD access token for the Cost Management API. You can use the Azure CLI or PowerShell to do this. Here is an example command using the Azure CLI:

az account get-access-token --resource https://management.azure.com/

Use the access token to call the "Usage Details - List" API to retrieve the cost and usage data for your Azure subscriptions. You can filter the data by date range, subscription, and other criteria. The API returns the data in JSON format.

Save the JSON data to a file or database.

Use a tool like Power BI or Excel to connect to the JSON data and create custom reports. You can use the tool's data modeling and visualization features to create reports that meet your specific needs.

Here are some resources that can help you get started with creating custom reports for Azure Cost Management:

Azure Cost Management APIs documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/cost-management/

Power BI documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/

Excel documentation: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/excel-for-windows-documentation-2abcc2e9-cc49-4488-a3f1-9b4a0a8e5a8b

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
Sadiqh Ahmed 49,571 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2023-07-07T14:36:10.89+00:00

@Mohamed Roushdy Just checking in to see if you got a chance to see my response and if it helped, I would request you to "Accept Answer and Upvote" so that the relevancy of this post will improve when anyone in the community search for a similar query.
Sadiqh Ahmed 49,571 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2023-07-10T06:50:02.37+00:00

@Mohamed Roushdy We haven't heard back from you. Please reply if you have any questions in this matter and we will gladly continue the discussion.

2 answers

Your answer

Sadiqh Ahmed 49,571 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2023-07-06T07:02:40.3966667+00:00

Hello @Mohamed Roushdy Thank you for reaching out to us on Microsoft Q&A platform. Happy to help!

I understand your requirement for creating dashboard or a report to compare different periods.

Comparison reports are not available natively. You can consider creating custom report through offline tooling. Azure Cost Management provides a set of APIs that you can use to retrieve cost and usage data for your Azure subscriptions. You can use these APIs to extract the data and then use a tool like Power BI or Excel to create custom reports.

Here are the high-level steps to create a custom report using offline tooling:

Get an Azure AD access token for the Cost Management API. You can use the Azure CLI or PowerShell to do this. Here is an example command using the Azure CLI:

az account get-access-token --resource https://management.azure.com/

Use the access token to call the "Usage Details - List" API to retrieve the cost and usage data for your Azure subscriptions. You can filter the data by date range, subscription, and other criteria. The API returns the data in JSON format.

Save the JSON data to a file or database.

Use a tool like Power BI or Excel to connect to the JSON data and create custom reports. You can use the tool's data modeling and visualization features to create reports that meet your specific needs.

Here are some resources that can help you get started with creating custom reports for Azure Cost Management:

Azure Cost Management APIs documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/cost-management/

Power BI documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/

Excel documentation: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/excel-for-windows-documentation-2abcc2e9-cc49-4488-a3f1-9b4a0a8e5a8b

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
Sadiqh Ahmed 49,571 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2023-07-07T14:36:10.89+00:00

@Mohamed Roushdy Just checking in to see if you got a chance to see my response and if it helped, I would request you to "Accept Answer and Upvote" so that the relevancy of this post will improve when anyone in the community search for a similar query.
Sadiqh Ahmed 49,571 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2023-07-10T06:50:02.37+00:00

@Mohamed Roushdy We haven't heard back from you. Please reply if you have any questions in this matter and we will gladly continue the discussion.

Answer 1

Don Lewis 0

I don't see billing period as an option for group by.

0 comments

Answer 2

Hi Mohamed,

This is possible, I am using this to compare months with each other. Ill try to explain it in steps so you can follow along easily,

To compare two months with each other in one tab using Azure Cost Management, you can follow these steps:

Select Cost Analysis: In the Azure Cost Management + Billing service, select "Cost Analysis" from the left-hand menu. This will open the Cost Analysis dashboard.

Select the desired time range: In the top right corner of the Cost Analysis dashboard, click on the date range picker. Choose the time range that covers the two months you want to compare. For example, select the entire month range for both months.

Group the data by month: In the Cost Analysis toolbar, click on the "Group by" button and select "billing period" as the grouping option. This will aggregate the cost and usage data by month.

I hope this answers your question.

Kind regards,

Murat

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Cost management - compare different periods

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