Cost Management – Buchatech.com

In my day to day I do cloud foundations work helping companies with their Azure governance and management. On projects we will develop a tagging strategy. A tagging strategy is only good if it is actually used. One way to ensure that tags are used is by using Azure Policy to require tags on resource groups or resources.

In the past I have used the deny effect in an Azure Policy to require tags upon resource creation. I basically use the template as previously blogged about here: https://www.buchatech.com/2019/03/requiring-many-tags-on-resource-groups-via-azure-policy. This policy works but can be a problem because the error that is given when denied during deployment is not clear about what tags are required. Also, folks think it is a pain and slows down the provisioning process.

I set out to require tags using a different method. The idea was to use the effect append vs deny so that resources without the proper tags would be flagged as non-compliant and the policy would add the required tags with generic values. Someone from the cloud team could then go put in the proper values for the tags bringing the resources into compliance. Th end result was that the effect append does work remediating with a single tag but falls down when trying to remediate using multiple tags.

I discovered that this behavior was intended and that the append effect only supports one remediation action (i.e. one tag). On 9-20-19 Microsoft updated the modify effect so that Modify can handle multiple ‘operations’ – where each operation specifies what needs to be remediated.

Now let’s walk through using the modify effect in an Azure Policy to add multiple tags on a resource group.

You will need to start off by coding your Azure Policy definition template. There are three important parts you need to ensure you have in template. You need to have modify effect for the proper effect, roleDefinitionIds as this is the role that will be used by the managed identity set as contributor, and operations to tell Azure policy what to do when remediation out of compliance resources.

"effect": "modify",

and

"roleDefinitionIds": [
            "/providers/Microsoft.Authorization/roleDefinitions/b24988ac-6180-42a0-ab88-20f7382dd24c"

and

 "operations": [
            {
            "operation": "addOrReplace",

Here is a screenshot of the template.

You can get the full Azure Policy definition ARM Template on my GitHub here:

Required Tags Azure Policy Modify Effect.json

Add the ARM template as a new policy definition in the Azure portal.

See the following screenshot to complete your Azure policy definition.

You will then see your new Azure policy definition.

Next, you need to assign the Azure policy definition. To do this click on Assignments.

See the following screenshot to complete your Azure policy assignment.

Note that this policy assignment will create a managed identity so that the policy has the ability to edit tags on existing resources.

The assignment will now be created but the evaluation has not happened so the compliance state will be set to not started as shown in the following screenshot.

IT financial management (ITFM) is an important part of IT operations as business dependency on IT continues to grow in the age of digital transformation. ITFM is a part of ITIL as a Service Strategy element in the framework. ITFM is a key part of CloudOps as well because spending in the cloud is based on an OPEX model and every single cost is tracked. ITFM and cost management in the cloud should be used to effectively and concisely connect the dollars spent on IT to the value delivered to the business. We can do this with Azure Cost Management. In this post, I am going to give an overview of Azure cost management highlighting many of the things you can do with it. Let’s dive into the solution now.

Overview

In June of 2017, Microsoft acquired Cloudyn a startup that had tooling for cloud monitoring and analytics tools focused on cloud financial management. Cloudyn’s solution is multi-cloud covering Azure, Azure Stack, AWS, and GCP. Through the acquisition of Cloudyn Microsoft was able to bring the tooling into the Azure ecosystem giving Azure customers an enhanced way to track and control cloud spend improving the improving the Azure cloud governance story. As of right now, there is a free level and a paid level for Azure cost management. The following table lists what features are available with each level.

FREE capabilities:

Reporting	Report on cost and usage
Data enrichment	Categorize by resource tags
Budgets	Create and manage cost and usage budgets
Alerting	Create alerts on cost and usage budgets
Recommendations	Eliminate idle cloud resources Right-size cloud resources

PAID capabilities:

Chargeback features including cost markup, redistribution, and custom charges

Import external budgets

Customize recommendation thresholds

Categorize costs with custom meta-tags

Since the acquisition, Microsoft has added a link to the Cloudyn portal directly in Azure and integration with your Azure subscriptions giving you the ability to launch a new Cloudyn account that is tied to your subscription. Microsoft added Cost Management in Azure and this is where you will find Cloudyn and sign up. As shown in the following screenshot you can see the “Go to Cost Management” button. After clicking on that you will go the Cloudyn portal and will be able to add your various cloud accounts. The thing that I really like about Azure cost management is that there is a ton of data and dashboards that are available right out of the box after adding a cloud account. There is not a bunch of configuration that you need to do to get the default dashboards and optimization tools.

After you are all signed up and have your cloud accounts added your dashboards will start to show data. The next two screenshots show a couple of the default dashboards.

The management dashboard gives a good summary of your cloud financials on one pane of glass.

The cost controller dashboard shows cost trends, some forecasting info, a breakdown of costs and more.

As you can see from the previous screenshots there are several other dashboards with other content. You can modify any of these dashboards adding or removing widgets. You also can create your own dashboard adding whatever widgets you want to it.

In Azure cost management, you can add cost centers known as Cost Entities. Entities are intended to mirror your organization’s hierarchical structure such as business units, divisions, departments, or teams within your organization some examples are engineering, R&D, development, marketing etc. The goal of the entities is to give you a way to track cloud spend by the entities. Keep in mind the cost entities can be anything that fits the way you want to structure and track cloud costs. You also can leverage tags, add budgets, and then associate costs and or budgets to the cost entities into cost models. Cost models give you a way to distribute and allocate costs. You can track costs back to these cost entities and you can track costs against budgets for showback or chargeback scenarios. Below is a screenshot of the cost entities screen. Keep an eye out for a detailed blog from me walking through how to structure and set up this part of Azure cost management. This area of Azure cost management warrants its own dedicated blog.

Here is an example of a budget set on a cost entity.