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Cost Management - AZ-104

📖 Cost Management and Billing Documentation - Monitor and optimize Azure spending

Azure Cost Management

📖 What is Cost Management? - Understand your Azure costs and usage - Analyze spending - Create budgets - Export cost data - Recommendations for optimization

Cost Analysis:

📖 Quickstart: Explore and Analyze Costs - Start analyzing your Azure costs

  • View by service, resource group, tag
  • Filter by time range
  • Forecast future costs
  • Visualize with charts

Budgets

📖 Create and Manage Budgets - Set spending alerts and controls

  • Set spending limits
  • Alert when threshold reached (50%, 75%, 90%, 100%)
  • Action groups for notifications
  • Monthly, quarterly, annual budgets

Cost Allocation

  • Tag resources
  • Show-back and charge-back
  • Filter cost reports by tags
  • Tag policies to enforce tagging

Azure Advisor - Cost

📖 Reduce Costs with Azure Advisor - Cost optimization recommendations

  • Recommendations to reduce costs
  • Resize/shutdown underutilized VMs
  • Reserved Instance recommendations
  • Delete unattached disks
  • Configure auto-shutdown

Pricing Calculator

📖 Azure Pricing Calculator - Estimate costs for Azure services

  • Estimate Azure costs before deployment
  • Configure services and usage
  • Export estimates
  • Compare scenarios

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator

📖 TCO Calculator - Calculate savings by migrating to Azure

  • Compare on-premises vs Azure
  • Include all costs (power, cooling, hardware, labor)
  • Migration scenarios

Cost Optimization Strategies

Compute: - Reserved Instances (1 or 3 years, up to 72% savings) - Azure Hybrid Benefit (Windows/SQL license reuse) - Spot VMs (up to 90% savings) - Auto-shutdown for dev/test - Right-size VMs

Storage: - Choose appropriate tier (Hot/Cool/Archive) - Lifecycle management - Delete old snapshots - Use managed disks

Networking: - Minimize data transfer between regions - Use CDN to reduce bandwidth - Reserved capacity for ExpressRoute

Azure Hybrid Benefit

📖 Azure Hybrid Benefit - Save money with existing licenses

  • Use existing Windows Server/SQL Server licenses
  • Software Assurance required
  • Up to 80% savings on VMs
  • Up to 55% savings on SQL Database

Reserved Instances

📖 Save with Azure Reservations - Reduce costs with upfront commitments

  • 1-year or 3-year commitment
  • Pay upfront, monthly, or no upfront
  • Significant discounts (up to 72%)
  • Exchange or cancel with conditions
  • Auto-renewal option

Exam Tips

  • Cost Management + Billing: Analyze and control spending
  • Budgets: Proactive cost alerts
  • Tags: Essential for cost allocation
  • Azure Advisor: Free cost optimization recommendations
  • Reserved Instances: Long-term savings
  • Azure Hybrid Benefit: License reuse
  • Pricing Calculator: Estimate before deployment
  • Right-sizing: Match resources to workload
  • Lifecycle policies: Auto-tier storage