Azure cost observability
Cost observability brings your Azure spend into SolarWinds Observability SaaS so that you can investigate cost next to the health, performance, and infrastructure data you already monitor. You can see what a subscription is spending month to date, which services and resources account for that spend, and how spend is trending.
Cost observability is enabled for each Azure cloud account individually. See In the Cost screen, select Enable Cost Observability to collect Azure cost data for this account. You can skip this step and enable cost observability later by editing the cloud account. For more information about the data collected, see Azure cost observability..
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Cost observability provides operational cost visibility. It is not a replacement for Azure Cost Management, and the values shown are not invoices.
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Calling the Azure billing APIs does not incur an Azure charge, so enabling cost observability does not increase your Azure bill.
Requirements
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An Azure cloud account added to SolarWinds Observability SaaS. See Add an Azure cloud account.
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The Cost Management Reader role, assigned to the same application registration that the integration already uses. Assign the role at the management group scope to cover all child subscriptions, or to each subscription individually.
The Reader and Monitoring Reader roles used for Azure Monitor and Azure Resource Graph do not grant access to billing data, so the Cost Management Reader role must be added separately. No additional application registration is required.
If the Cost Management Reader role is missing, Azure rejects the request for billing data and the cloud account changes to an error state, even though Azure Monitor metrics continue to be collected. If cost widgets remain empty after a full collection cycle, check the cloud account status and verify the role assignment.
Enable cost observability for an existing Azure account
You can enable cost observability when you configure a new Azure account. For existing accounts, edit the account to enable this option.
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Click Infrastructure > Azure, and then click an account name to display account details.
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Click the vertical ellipse menu in the upper-right corner, and then click Edit Cloud Account.
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In the Edit Azure Cloud Account wizard, click Next until the Cost page opens.
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Select Enable Cost Observability.
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Click Next until the Summary page opens, and then click Submit.
When cost data becomes available
Azure publishes billing data on a daily cadence, and SolarWinds Observability SaaS collects it once a day. After you enable cost observability, allow at least one collection and processing cycle before you evaluate the charts.
Each collection re-queries the most recent several days rather than only the previous day, because Azure continues to adjust billing records after they are first published. As a result, the cost shown for a recent day can change after you first see it, and it settles as Azure finalizes the billing period. Cost for older days is stable.
View Azure cost data
Cost data appears on the following pages.
Azure dashboard
The Azure dashboard includes two widgets that display aggregated spend and forcasted spend. Cost observability adds two additional tabs to the Azure dashboard: the Cost tab and the AI Cost tab.
Click the Cost tab to see the aggregated cost of every Azure cloud account in your organization. The tab shows month-to-date spend, projected monthly spend, spend broken down by account and by Azure service, the spend trend with forecast, and a table of cost per resource. Until cost observability is enabled for at least one Azure account, the tab shows a page prompting you to start analyzing Azure cost.
The AI Cost tab provides cost details only for Azure AI resources.
Azure cloud account details
On the details page for an individual Azure cloud account, click the Cost tab to see the same information scoped to that one account.
The Cost tab is available for Azure cloud accounts only. It is not available for AWS or GCP cloud accounts.
Azure cost metrics
Cost observability adds the following measurements, which you can chart in the Metrics Explorer along with the rest of your Azure telemetry. These are collected from the Azure billing APIs and are not Azure Monitor metrics.
| Name | Description |
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Total daily spend for an Azure subscription. |
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Daily spend for an individual Azure service. |
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Daily cost of an individual Azure resource. Where the resource is monitored by SolarWinds Observability SaaS, the measurement is associated with the corresponding entity, so you can compare a resource's cost with its telemetry. |
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Projected spend for the next 30 days, based on the trend in your Azure billing data. The forecast is an estimate and does not account for planned changes such as new deployments or reservation purchases. |