Azure is a service utility that offers the following benefits:

• No upfront costs
• No termination fees
• Billing on a per-minute basis
• Payment based on consumption

In such circumstances, it is very difficult to estimate the cost of consuming Azure resources. Every resource in Azure has its own cost model and charge based on storage, usage, and timespan. It is very important for the management, administration, and finance departments of a company to keep track of usage and costs. Azure provides the necessary usage and billing reports, such that an organization's management and administrators can generate cost and usage reports based on all sorts of criteria.

The Azure portal provides detailed billing and usage information through the Billing feature, which can be accessed from the master navigation blade:

It provides a sub-menu for generating reports on both costs and billing:

Clicking on the Subscriptions menu on this blade provides a list of all the subscriptions that the user has access to for generating reports:

Clicking on the subscription name in this list will provide a dashboard through which the complete billing, invoice, usage, consumption, policies, resource groups, and resources information can be found. The chart in this Overview section provides a cost percentage by resource and also a burn rate:

Clicking on the chart shows details of costs based on each resource. Here there are multiple Storage accounts provisioned on Azure, and the cost for each is displayed. Using this screen, many types of report can be generated by providing different criteria, such as any combination of the following:

• Resource types
• Resource group
• Timespan
• Tags

Tags are particularly interesting. Queries based on tags such as department, project, owner, cost center, or any other name-value pair can be used to display cost information. You can also download the cost report as a CSV file using the Download button:

Clicking on an individual resource provides the daily cost consumption data for the resource: