When are costs available through the cost API?

Question

I'm retrieving costs on a daily basis. Since we are GMT+2 I am only retrieving costs for two days ago. I would take today's date and subtract 2 days, so for 17 April 2024 I would get the costs for 15 April 2024. I have a scheduled job that performs this processing at 2h00 each morning.

However, I have found that at times the costs returned are not correct. They mostly are, though. I have even had days where absolutely no costs are returned for ZAR costs, but a couple of the USD costs are returned.

My question is therefore: when are costs guaranteed to be available through the cost API? Should I increase to 3 days, or perhaps a week? Or is there perhaps a way that I can check cost availability through the API?

Answer 1

Hello @Eben Roux Thank you for posting your question on the Microsoft Q&A platform. Happy to help!

From the information you provided, I understand that you have a requirement to retrieve cost data on daily basis and when tried with "today's date and subtract 2 days" the cost data is incorrect.

You should use Today's date and 3 days to get the accurate cost. It will still be an approximate. However, you will see the cost via the API which would mostly match with the Cost Management in the Portal UX. Doc reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/cost-management/

Hope this helps. If you have any questions, please reply to this post and we will take it further.

---

If the response helped, do "Accept Answer" and up-vote it