Introduction

  • 2 minutes

You're an administrator for Azure subscriptions with resources that run your company’s customer facing eCommerce website. Your website has a large presence with Azure; its workload involves a large number of virtual machines and SQL servers. It has costs distributed across other Azure resources to do additional backend processing. You've used some of Microsoft Cost Management’s features in the Azure portal, including Cost Analysis. You've also used Power BI. It has helped answer questions about your resource use. Now you want to learn how to use Power BI with Microsoft Cost Management so you can perform additional analysis and get more of the raw data behind your Azure usage and charges.

As a part of the analysis, you're interested in using Power BI to identify:

  • Key cost drivers.
  • Spending trends.
  • Anomalous behaviors in your raw usage data.

You've heard that your organization can save money with Azure Hybrid Benefits. You're interested in learning more about how Azure Hybrid benefits might apply to your organization. Your organization might already be using Hybrid Benefits today for its SQL Servers and VMs. If so, you want to maximize your savings by managing your use in Power BI.

You're also aware that your company is using Azure Reserved Instances to save money. You're interested in learning more about how to use Power BI to understand and optimize your Azure Reservation coverage.

Finally, you want to know how to build your own cost reports in Power BI Desktop, so you want to learn how to connect Power BI Desktop to Azure’s raw usage and charges data. From there, you'll start creating your first report. You plan to share it with your engineering team to track the monthly cost for the production environment of your company’s eCommerce website.

Learning objectives

In this module, you'll:

  • Analyze your costs using Cost Management reporting in the Microsoft Cost Management Power BI App.
  • Increase your organization’s use of hybrid benefits.
  • Increase your savings by optimizing your organization’s Reserved Instance coverage.
  • Enable custom reporting creation within your team through the Cost Management data connector for Power BI Desktop.

Prerequisites

To connect your Azure subscription to Power BI Desktop and to use the Microsoft Cost Management Power BI app, you need the following configuration settings:

  • For your Enterprise Agreement:
    • The AO/DO view charges options must be enabled in the EA portal
    • You must have EA Admin permission

To connect your Azure subscription to Power BI Desktop for a Microsoft Customer Agreement:

  • You must be a Billing account owner

The Microsoft Cost Management Power BI app is only supported for Enterprise Agreements. The app doesn't support Microsoft Customer Agreements.

  • A Power BI Pro license to install and use the app
  • Basic understanding of the Azure resource hierarchy, including subscriptions and resource groups
  • Basic knowledge of Power BI and data analysis techniques such as how to set up a dashboard and filter data
  • Knowledge of various Azure purchase benefits, including Azure Reserved Instances and Azure Hybrid benefits