Converting CAPEX to OPEX is one of the top and most lucrative benefits driving organizations toward cloud adoption. The onus is always on fast-paced migration: If we can just get to the cloud quickly, all of our problems will be solved. But is that really the case? Unfortunately, the answer is no.

Your monthly cloud bill might still be a shocker if you don’t have the right cost management measures in place. Overprovisioned VMs that are rarely used, machines provisioned and forgotten, test machines running 24/7—these are only a few of the many resources hidden in plain sight that could be driving up your monthly cloud bill.

Having worked with many enterprise customers in various phases of their digital transformation journey using Azure, I’ve noticed that even the organizations with the best IT teams need a helping hand when it comes to making the pay-as-you-go model work to their benefit. BP’s Azure adoption story is a great example, as the oil and gas “supermajor” maintains more than 25% of its workloads in Azure.

However, BP experienced some hiccups initially, where manual governance and management processes were simply unable to deliver the level of cost optimization they were hoping for. Eventually, with the help of native tools like Azure Cost Management and Azure Monitor, they were able to reduce their cloud spend by 40%. This reduction was sustained even though their cloud usage doubled when additional workloads were later migrated.

If BP’s success story is any proof, it’s clear that continuous monitoring and optimization of Azure costs should be an integral part of every cloud adoption plan. The first part of this blog series will explore the various tools and services available in Azure to help monitor the cost of resources deployed in the platform. The second part of this blog post will cover the many ways customers can optimize the platform as well as best practices for minimizing cloud spending.

Cloud Cost Monitoring in Azure: Key Considerations

When it comes to Azure cost management and optimization, it can be difficult to know what to look out for, especially for those customers who are new to the platform. Below are some pointers to get you started.

Analyze Usage Patterns

As with any other resource, cloud deployments are also in danger of being deployed and then forgotten until the shocker of a bill arrives. That’s why it’s important to keep a close eye on cloud usage patterns across the board. Visibility into these patterns from the early stages will enable you to make any necessary adjustments. This will also allow you to predict your monthly, quarterly, and yearly cloud bill with greater accuracy.

While Azure’s pricing calculator can be useful during the planning phase, it offers more of an informed estimate. On the ground, the reality will be different; there could be unexpected components resulting in additional costs, such as hosted applications that end up using more network egress and increasing the bandwidth cost. It’s also useful to group resources in order to review usage. For example, if your finance team resource group spending is higher than expected, this could be a call to action to drill down and check for unused premium disks, orphaned VMs, the wrong storage tier, and other issues.