How to run a real time monitoring of budgets of azure resource groups through a 3rd party application.

Question

So i wanted to know if there are any ways in which we can monitor and observe the live costings of azure resource groups in our own applications .Correct me if im wrong, ideally we need to wait a couple of hours inorder to get costings of different resource groups and their services on azure. If there any solutions regarding this, do let me know.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Hello Srishan S,

Unfortunately, Azure doesn’t provide truly live cost data for resource groups or subscriptions. By design, Cost Management and Billing usage data typically refreshes every 4–8 hours, and in some cases, it can take up to 24 hours before new charges appear. So, if you’re seeing a delay that’s expected behavior, not a misconfiguration.

That said, here are your practical options:

1. Use Cost Management REST APIs for near-real-time pulls

• Query API: Query API
• Poll these endpoints periodically (e.g., every few hours) from your app and display the data.

2. Combine budgets & alerts for threshold notifications

• Create budgets per resource group: Create and Manage Azure Budgets.
• Hook alerts to Action Groups or webhooks: Integrate cost alerts with Action Groups.
• While not live, these provide automated notifications when spend crosses thresholds.

3. Approximate “real-time” with resource metrics

For services like VMs or storage, use Azure Monitor metrics or Application Insights to watch actual consumption (CPU, transactions, bandwidth).

• Multiply by the published pricing rates from the Azure Pricing Calculator to estimate live costs in your app.
• This is custom work but is the only way to approximate sub-hour insights.

4. Evaluate third-party tools

Platforms like CloudZero, CloudHealth, Kubecost (for AKS), or Datadog Cloud Cost Management can ingest Azure cost data and provide enhanced dashboards. But even they can’t bypass Azure’s refresh latency they just make the experience friendlier.

Summary

• No: True real-time cost streaming from Azure.
• Yes: Near-real-time (hours-delayed) via Cost Management APIs, budgets + alerts, or approximate via consumption metrics.

For more detail, see Microsoft’s guidance on data update frequency:

• Understand Cost Management data update frequency
• Generate Cost Details Report

I hope this information helps. Thank you!

Answer 2

Hi,

that is a brilliant question. getting real time cost data is the holy grail for so many teams, but azure's inherent delay makes it tricky ))

you are absolutely right. the standard azure cost management data has a latency of several hours, sometimes even up to 24-48 hours for final numbers. it's not truly real time because of the massive backend processing needed to aggregate all the usage records.

but there is a way to get much closer to real time insights! you need to tap into the azure event grid service. it publishes events for almost everything, including usage records.

set up an event grid subscription for the microsoft.consumption/usageevents event type. this will push notifications to your third party application as soon as a usage record is generated. this is about as real time as u can get.

your app can receive these events, parse the json payload, and then update its own internal dashboard. this gives u a near live view of resource consumption.

for the actual cost, u will still need to do a tiny bit of math. the event gives u the usage quantity and the resource id. u then multiply that by the rate for that resource in your subscription. storing a simple lookup table for resource rates in your app handles this.

check the azure consumption api. while it's not instantaneous, it can provide more frequent data pulls than the cost management ui. u can set your app to poll this api every hour for the latest aggregated data. https://learn.microsoft.com/rest/api/cost-management/query

hope this points u in the right direction. building your own live cost dashboard is a powerful move.

Best regards,

Alex

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