With all the changes in Azure, it is sometimes hard to keep track, that's why I thought I would give you a quick update on two exiting things I learned this week. In this update, I want to share a couple of things new updates to Azure Cost Management, Azure Files, and more.

New Power BI reports for Azure reservations and Azure Hybrid Benefit to help save money

If you are not familiar with the PowerBI Dashboard for Azure Cost Management, it helps you to get insights into your Azure cost data. Using the new Azure Cost Management Template app for Power BI, you can import and analyze your Azure cost and usage data within Power BI. The reports provided, allow you to gain insights into which subscriptions or resource groups are consuming the most. It also provides visibility into spending trends and overall usage. In this week's blog post, Michael Flanakin (Program Manager, Azure Cost Management) shares updates to the Power BI template app, which will make it easier to take advantage of the Azure Hybrid Benefit and Azure reservations and save money.

Azure Hybrid Benefits - Cost Management PowerBI Dashboard

If you are using the Azure Hybrid Benefit, you get now:

You can see how many VMs have the Azure Hybrid Benefit (AHB) enabled, so you can see if you have additional licenses available to reduce costs.

If you have additional licenses available, you can now also identify eligible VMs based on their core/vCPU count.

If you are looking into using Azure Reservations to save money using Virtual Machines reserved instances (RI), you can now look at the new VM RI coverage pages.

Identify new opportunities to use the RI based on historical data, so you can see why the reservation is recommended.

You also get an overview of past purchases of RI

And on the RI savings page, you will get a glimpse of how much you saved using Azure Reservations.

If you want to know more about what is new in Cost Management and Billing in February, check out the full blog post here: Azure Cost Management + Billing updates – February 2020 and if you want to learn more about how you can recuse the cost for your Azure IaaS virtual machines, check out my blog here.

Frank Boucher (Cloud Advocate at Microsoft) also recorded a video based on that blog post:

Preview of Active Directory authentication support on Azure Files

This week the Azure Files teams announced the preview of Active Directory authentication support for Azure Files. With that, you can now create a simple file share in Azure and integrate it into your local active directory domain, so people can access it as it would be a file share running on a Windows Server. Will Gries (Program Manager for Azur Files) and I recorded a short Azure Unblogged video, to explain the new features in Azure Files.

This is great if you want to replace your file servers on-premises with a file share hosted in Azure, but it is also a great feature if you are using Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) on Azure.

I hope this short blog post provided you with some exciting news from this week. I know there is much more than just the things I listed here. I recommend that you follow the Azure announcements blog. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Also, check out last week's Az Update here.