At Microsoft Ignite, we announced key product updates to enable your FinOps journey.
As you may know, November is the month for Microsoft’s largest customer and partner event—Microsoft Ignite. This year, we in the Cost management team, announced key product updates at this event to enable your FinOps journey. Below, you’ll find a summary of these enhancements. We invite you to explore and take full advantage of these new features!
Let’s dig into the details.
Exports to Microsoft Fabric
Exports is a great way to get your costs and price datasets for your storage, analysis and reporting needs. It is very easy to set up and you can configure it to run at a recurring schedule with no manual intervention. You can quickly set it up using the Azure portal or through the API. This year we have made multiple enhancements to our exports solution including support for additional datasets, support for parquet format and compression. We just added one more to this list! At Ignite, we announced limited availability of our Exports to Fabric connector OneLake. With this new feature, you can export your costs and price datasets directly to Microsoft Fabric, saving you time and effort to ingest cost data into Fabric from your storage account.
Please note that this feature is not generally available yet. You can sign up for us to enable this functionality for your account by submitting this form. Our team will get back to you via email with relevant instructions in the January timeframe.
With Microsoft Fabric, you get a unified platform for your data storage, analysis, and reporting needs. You can combine data from multiple sources and leverage Fabric’s integrated Power BI to create reporting dashboards for your business needs. Additionally, you can use natural language prompts to gain insights into your data and for predictive analytics. Learn more about Fabric and its’ powerful capabilities.
Azure OpenAI Service costs
Azure OpenAI view
In our last blog, I wrote about how easy it is to manage your Azure OpenAI Service costs in Cost analysis. You can analyze costs for different time periods, monitor costs using scheduled emails and budgets, and optimize your costs by leveraging Azure OpenAI provisioned reservations.
To make it even easier for you to analyze your Azure OpenAI costs, we are thrilled to announce the availability of a new built-in view: Azure OpenAI. In this new view, you can view the costs of running all your models for different time periods (actual and amortized both). This view also includes the costs for reservation purchases if the purchasing subscription is under the selected scope.
You can access this view in Cost analysis under All Views -> Smart Views as shown in the screenshot below:
Copilot simulation for Azure OpenAI Service
As you already know, Copilot is a great tool for getting your cost-related queries answered using natural language. As an example, you can ask Copilot your costs for running Azure OpenAI deployments as shown in the prompt below:
Now, we have extended our Copilot capabilities to even help you estimate costs for your Azure OpenAI token-based deployments. An example prompt is included below:
This is just the beginning, we will continue to make enhancements to support more simulation scenarios making it easier for you to estimate and hence plan for your Azure spend.
As always, you can continue to use the pricing calculator for all your estimation needs including Azure OpenAI.
Azure Copilot to Cost analysis
We have made an exciting update to your Copilot experience for Cost Management by integrating Cost analysis into the Copilot generated responses. In most of the responses, you will notice a “View in Cost analysis” button which takes you to the customized Cost analysis view based on your prompt. This enables you to take further action in Cost analysis like analyzing cost with different parameters, sharing the view with others in your team, getting email alerts, and more.
To start utilizing this feature, simply ask your cost-related question like you would normally do. There is no extra configuration needed. As an example:
Clicking on the “View in Cost Analysis” button from the response will open a new Cost analysis view grouped by service name for October 2024. You can remain focused on your task in hand while Copilot does the required configurations for you!
If you still haven’t given Copilot in Azure a try for your cost-related questions, I strongly encourage you to try some sample prompts we have for you to get started.
New ways to save money in the Microsoft Cloud
Here are some offers that can potentially help you reduce costs:
Documentation updates
Here are a few documentation updates you might be interested in:
Want to keep an eye on all documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing documentation change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request. You can also submit a GitHub issue. We welcome and appreciate all contributions!
What’s next?
These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don’t forget to check out the previous Microsoft Cost Management updates. We’re always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.
