Cost Analysis Reports in Azure

Accessing Cost Analysis

Cost Analysis is available from any scope in the Azure portal:

1. Search for Cost Management + Billing in the portal search bar.
2. Select Cost Management.
3. In the left menu, click Cost analysis.
4. Verify the scope shown at the top — you can analyse at subscription, resource group, or management group level. Click the scope selector to change it.

You can also navigate directly to cost analysis for a specific resource group by opening that resource group and clicking Cost analysis in its left menu. This is a quick way to check the cost of a specific project or environment without needing to configure filters.

Built-in Views

Cost Analysis starts with a set of built-in views that cover the most common reporting needs:

• Accumulated cost: shows cumulative spending over the selected time period with a trend line. Useful for seeing whether spend is accelerating or stable.
• Daily costs: a bar chart of day-by-day spending. Useful for spotting anomalies — a tall bar on a specific day indicates an unusual event.
• Cost by service: breaks down spend by Azure service name (e.g., Virtual Machines, SQL Database, Storage).
• Cost by resource: shows individual resource costs. This view identifies your top-spending resources by name.
• Cost by resource group: groups costs by resource group. Useful in multi-team environments where each team has its own resource group.
• Invoice details: matches the data on your actual invoice.

Grouping and Filtering

The real power of Cost Analysis comes from combining grouping dimensions and filters. Every view allows you to group costs by and filter on:

• Resource group
• Service name (e.g., “Virtual Machines”)
• Resource type (e.g., “microsoft.compute/virtualmachines”)
• Location (Azure region)
• Tag name and value (e.g., environment:production)
• Meter category and subcategory
• Subscription (useful at management group scope)

Common analysis patterns

Actual Cost vs Amortised Cost

When you purchase a Reserved Instance with an upfront payment, the entire cost appears in the month of purchase under actual cost view. This creates a spike in that month’s cost report that obscures the underlying usage patterns. Amortised cost solves this by spreading the RI purchase price across all the months it covers.

For example, a 1-year upfront Reserved Instance costing $1,200 would show as a $1,200 charge in month one under actual cost, but approximately $100/month across all 12 months under amortised cost.

For day-to-day cost management and chargeback reporting, amortised cost is almost always the more useful view. Switch to it using the Cost (amortised) option in the metric selector at the top of the Cost Analysis view.

Saving and Sharing Custom Views

Once you have configured a useful combination of grouping, filters, and time range, you can save it as a named view that you and your team can return to without reconfiguring:

1. Configure the view as desired.
2. Click Save at the top of the Cost Analysis pane.
3. Give the view a descriptive name like “Production VMs — Monthly Amortised” or “Team Alpha Tag Costs”.
4. Choose whether to save as private (only you can see it) or shared (visible to anyone with access to the scope).

Saved views appear in the left navigation panel under Views, making them quick to access for regular reviews such as weekly cost check-ins or monthly finance reporting.

Exporting and Querying Cost Data

For recurring reporting needs, manual portal exploration is not scalable. Azure provides two better alternatives:

Scheduled exports

Cost Management can export daily, weekly, or monthly cost data automatically to an Azure Storage account as CSV files. This is the recommended approach for feeding cost data into data warehouses, Power BI reports, or custom dashboards.

# Create a scheduled export of monthly costs to a storage account
az costmanagement export create \
  --name "monthly-cost-export" \
  --scope "/subscriptions/$(az account show --query id -o tsv)" \
  --type ActualCost \
  --dataset-granularity Monthly \
  --recurrence Monthly \
  --recurrence-period from="2026-04-01" to="2027-04-01" \
  --storage-account-id "/subscriptions/{sub-id}/resourceGroups/{rg}/providers/Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/{account}" \
  --storage-container "cost-exports" \
  --storage-directory "monthly"

Cost Management API query

# Query costs via CLI for the current month grouped by service
az costmanagement query \
  --type Usage \
  --scope "/subscriptions/$(az account show --query id -o tsv)" \
  --timeframe MonthToDate \
  --dataset-granularity None \
  --dataset-aggregation "{\"totalCost\":{\"name\":\"Cost\",\"function\":\"Sum\"}}" \
  --dataset-grouping "[{\"name\":\"ServiceName\",\"type\":\"Dimension\"}]" \
  --query "properties.rows" \
  --output table

# Same query but grouped by resource group
az costmanagement query \
  --type Usage \
  --scope "/subscriptions/$(az account show --query id -o tsv)" \
  --timeframe MonthToDate \
  --dataset-granularity None \
  --dataset-aggregation "{\"totalCost\":{\"name\":\"Cost\",\"function\":\"Sum\"}}" \
  --dataset-grouping "[{\"name\":\"ResourceGroupName\",\"type\":\"Dimension\"}]" \
  --query "properties.rows" \
  --output table

The Importance of Tagging for Cost Analysis

Cost Analysis is only as useful as your tagging strategy. Without consistent tags, the “group by tag” views are meaningless. At minimum, every resource that incurs cost should have:

• environment: production, staging, development, or test
• team or owner: identifies which team owns the resource
• project or application: ties the resource to a business application or initiative
• cost-centre: the finance cost centre for chargeback or showback

Tags are applied at the resource or resource group level. Enforce tagging with Azure Policy to ensure new resources are always tagged correctly from creation.

# Apply tags to an existing resource group
az tag update \
  --resource-id "/subscriptions/{sub-id}/resourceGroups/my-rg" \
  --operation Merge \
  --tags environment=production team=platform project=myapp cost-centre=IT001

# List all resources missing required tags in a subscription
az resource list \
  --query "[?tags.environment == null].{Name:name, Type:type, RG:resourceGroup}" \
  --output table