Powerful 6 Azure cost optimization tools in 2023

Azure cost optimization challenges

At the bottom line, Azure pricing will vary based on several factors, like a capacity requirement, the resource you consume, the tier you choose, and the desired location for hosting.

Also, due to its flexible nature, like auto-scaling, serverless, and pay-as-you-go model, it is pretty easy to provision or scale the services on demand and left unattended.

The above factors can make it hard to visualize if you’re getting value back or overpaying for the provisioned services.

We have seen first-hand that many Azure customers report surprise monthly billings. Generally, invoices for public cloud services take a lot of work to interpret and understand where to optimize the cost.

An ideal Azure cost optimization tool should help you sense spending by providing the custom visualization you desire, proactively alerting you on budget threshold violations, and significantly reducing monthly bills with automatic optimization.

The Best Azure Cost Optimization Tools in 2023

Here is our list of the five best Azure cost optimization tools in the market.

1. Serverless360 (EDITOR’S CHOICE)
   It is a SaaS-based platform that provides granular Azure cost information based on your business dimensions, which could be the cost per environment, customer, team, or project. On top of this, you also get an automatic cost optimization module to lower monthly billings. 15-day free trial.
2. Microsoft Azure cost management
   It is a native tool provided by Microsoft to its users for free. This has built-in dashboards with different views and analytics to understand usage patterns limited to specific subscriptions or resources.
3. myCloudDoctor
   The platform delivers the cost of the Azure resources with rich dashboards to help you enable split out the charges and track the usage of the shared Azure resources. It gives you a multi-cloud cost report in a single view for cloud engineers.
4. Apptio Cloudability
   With this platform, you should tag the Azure resources promptly to correctly see the actual cost incurred by the resources based on business departments. It might be helpful for Solution Providers.
5. nOPs
   It helps to optimize the cost of Kubernetes and container services with real-time cost insights. Get recommendations on the reservations instance management. It is helpful to FinOps teams to get a high-level overview of the Azure spending.
6. Spot
   This platform is helpful if you plan to use Spot resources at scale. Spot by Net App can help you cut costs. Also, you can implement cost optimization recommendations manually.

What should you look for in Azure cost optimization Tools?

We reviewed the available Azure cost optimization tools in the market and analyzed the options based on the following criteria:

• Integration with the Azure platform
• Granular cost bifurcation is based on business dimensions like customers or projects.
• An automatic optimization capability to lower the cost.
• A usage analysis and forecasting tool.
• A tool to compare the cost of alternative resources.
• Consolidated tracking for multiple subscriptions.
• A free trial or demo system to evaluate the tool at zero cost.
• A paid tool that is worth the money as it saves monthly bills while eliminating the manual effort or a good free tool

1. Serverless360 (Free Trial)

It is a cloud-based SaaS platform also available as a Private Hosting (Deployed in your infrastructure) option; it facilitates enterprise companies, managed service providers, and consulting companies to dissect and group the Azure cost from multiple subscriptions based on their business dimension needs.

For instance, if you've managed a service provider and consulting partner responsible for maintaining the various customers' Azure infrastructure, you can generate the monthly Azure billings specific to respective customers on demand.

It helps to align specific cost insights to a team, feature, project, or process responsible for the generated cost, which will be helpful in accurate cost forecasting, allocation, and chargebacks.

It has an in-built intelligence module to help you forecast spending and automatically optimizes the cost of your existing resources by right-sizing and eliminating zombie resources.

It is one tool to digest Azure cost reports by your Engineers, FinOps, and C-suite stakeholders.

Key Features

• Cost aggregation based on business dimension.
• Cost tracking per functional group.
• Azure cost forecasting.
• Azure cost monitoring and initiative-taking alerting.
• Automatic Azure cost optimization.
• Custom cost reports for all key stakeholders

Why do we recommend it?

Serverless360 is a prime candidate for Azure cost optimization tools as it can provide complete performance tracking of Azure systems and support cost analysis. With this tool, you can get a dependency map of all your subscribed Azure services and see how they relate to each other. You can use this information to learn where the demand for a particular service is coming from. The Serverless360 system identifies all costs that contribute to a package, displays those costs in a system dashboard, and does all the attribution and aggregation work.

Schedule a demo here to experience Serverless360 yourself!

2. Microsoft Azure cost management (Free Tool)

The Cost Management and Billing module in the native Azure portal tool comes for free to Azure customers. This service helps the users to zoom in on the overall cost spent on their Azure subscription or resources to get detailed information.

One of the significant reasons why this is not in the number one slot is that it isn’t limited to only subscriptions, resources, or location individually, which will be hard to interpret and cut the actual cost.

Key Features

• Native Azure tool
• Free to consume
• Multiple dashboard views
• Displays the total cost spent

3. myCloudDoor

myCloudDoor Cloud Cost Management is a service hosted in Azure and accessible through the Azure Marketplace. This system collects usage statistics for multiple Azure services and shows the costs incurred over time. The system has attractive graphics showing the total cost and its components.

Key Features

• Cross-subscription visibility
• Cost allocation by department
• Aggregation and forecasting

4. Apptio Cloudability

Apptio Cloudability provides a stunning data visualization screen showing the current monthly cost of each cloud platform service subscription. The tool can aggregate across multiple providers, so you can see your total monthly spending, and it also shows the cost of each service.

Key Features

• Operates across services and platforms
• Provides forecasts
• Identifies overspend

5. nOps

nOps is a development automation tool that coordinates a set of cloud packages used for development, including project management, continuous testing, SDKs, and bug trackers. Part of the system tracks the usage of cloud resources provided by AWS and Azure services.

Key Features

• Great for DevOps environments
• Integrates into project management systems
• Performance monitoring

6. Spot

An effective way to reduce cloud costs is to use Spot resources. Spot refers to extra computing resources in the cloud. Anyone can leverage Spot capacity for transient and volatile workloads. Spot by NetApp helps to reduce costs.

Key Features

• Recommendation on reservations
• Cost allocation by department
• Aggregation and forecasting