Summary

  • 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. These features have 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 learned 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 learned 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've learned more about how to use Power BI to understand and optimize your Azure Reservation coverage.

Finally, you learned how to build your own cost reports in Power BI Desktop, as well as how to connect Power BI Desktop to Azure’s raw usage and charges data. From there, you created 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.

In this module, you learned how to:

  • 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.