Mike Austin breaks down how Azure charges for what you actually use, not just licenses. He shows how to find idle resources eating your budget and why comparing monthly spend directly is misleading when months have different numbers of days.
Questions this video answers
"They were spending 7k a month on storage. It went down to just over six, it's back up to seven and a half."
"They went from 7k a month on VMs to 4k a month."
"Virtual machine licenses, $1,000 a month."
"There are 31 days in May and 30 in June."
"This person/company went from 24k to 21k in May or June (and then just over 22k)."
Chapters
Foreign. So how do you use this data? Right. Like I said, it clarifies what I, what you need to buy. Right. So you know, can you look at what you're, you're spending on Prod dev test doctor Right. Does that make a difference? Can I look at what, what I'm spending on various categories of Microsoft? How's that trending month to month? Right. So you can see here, they were spending 7k a month on storage. It went down to just over six, it's back up to seven and a half. Well, can I dive into that? Which we can dive into that and see why do they put more on there? Are they, you know, doing things that are costing them money? Again, that shouldn't be. You can see here as they put reserve strategies, they went from 7k a month on VMS to 4k a month. Right. What is the service bus that they're spending money on? It's pretty consistent. But what is it? A lot of times people don't even know. They just get this bill and they're not even looking at it. It's just, they're just paying for it. Right. Look at what they're spending here on virtual machine licenses, $1,000 a month. Should they be or are there free ones that they can do? Right. And so what this does is starting to gather this sort of data together and putting in views. Is it going to allow me things to do things like make licensing easy for me? Right. So a lot of the times when people, we talk to people about licensing in Azure, it's really not about licensing because it's all about consuming resources. So it's all about consuming resources. And so licensing is sort of like still almost like the on premise concepts, but they have different rules. Right. So if I'm running a Windows server, I need a license for it. I'm not licensing a Windows server in Azure, I'm licensing a VM or I'm buying a vm, sorry is a better way to put that. And I need to have my Windows licenses that go on top of that. So again, looking at all this stuff and starting to pull this together because I can go in and look at these virtual machine licenses, you can see this is just an image. But if I click on that, I can see whether they're Windows licenses, SQL licenses, Red hat licenses, what am I paying licenses for to Microsoft. And if I'm paying licenses for things that maybe there's a benefit for or a right for, then I can go and look at my on premise footprint and look at bringing Bringing that in for me, on the zombie side, I can look at helping me decide what to deprovision. Right. Can I look at whether a server is actually being utilized or if it's just spun up? Right. A lot of times we see stuff that's just sitting there, spun up, looks like it's still in use, but it's not. It could be deprovisioned. Right. So like I said, I talked a little bit about this. Like, people believe that Azure is about licensing when it isn't. There's that component of it. It's more about understanding your metrics. And if you're familiar with the concept of finops, what I mean by understanding your metrics are, you know, if I look here, where this person, this company here went from 24k to 21k in May or June, right? Some people would say, oh, well, they had a significant drop, right? They went from 24K to 20, you know, just. Just over 22K. Well, there's 31 days in May and 30 in June. Right. So I can't compare them because I have an extra day. Right. And so was that really a significant drop? Because you can see it starts going back up into July and then, you know, in August and September, you know, there's. There. So there's probably something that they did in there. And I know what they did. I'm just using this as to illustrate. You have to understand what your metrics are. And the metric that most people want to use when it comes to Azure is monthly spend. You know, is my monthly spend staying flat or the same? But you know, compare February to July, you have three extra days. So, you know, even if nothing changes, you'd be like, what the heck happened? Why did we go up? Well, that's because there's three extra days. We're looking at the wrong metric, right? So you really want to be starting to think about your metrics, because different metrics apply to different things, right? So does what's my metric on storage versus my metric on vm, Right? Because they should be different. Like on vm, it might be hours running or days running. With storage, it's going to be, you know, gigabytes or terabytes or whatever, right? So you need to understand, understand that each service or resource, you're going to measure something, something different here, okay?
