Azure Cost

Unified Azure cost management capabilities across three primary workflows: querying historical costs, forecasting future spending, and optimizing resource usage.

Core Functions

Required Access

Roles needed: Cost Management Reader + Monitoring Reader + Reader on the appropriate scope.

Supported scopes: subscription, resource group, management group, billing account.

Essential Best Practices

1. Always query actual costs from Azure APIs before making recommendations
2. Present total bills alongside optimization suggestions
3. Validate pricing from official Azure sources
4. Include the header ClientType: GitHubCopilotForAzure on all Cost Management API requests
5. Respect rate limits (4 requests/minute per scope); check retry-after headers on 429 responses

Query Example

POST /subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/providers/Microsoft.CostManagement/query?api-version=2023-11-01
Content-Type: application/json
ClientType: GitHubCopilotForAzure

{
  "type": "ActualCost",
  "timeframe": "MonthToDate",
  "dataset": {
    "granularity": "Daily",
    "grouping": [
      { "type": "Dimension", "name": "ServiceName" }
    ]
  }
}

Optimization Targets

• Orphaned resources (unattached disks, unused IPs, empty resource groups)
• Oversized VMs (rightsize to smaller SKUs based on CPU/memory utilization)
• Reserved Instance opportunities (commit for 1 or 3 years for significant discounts)
• Spot/preemptible instances for fault-tolerant workloads

Scope

This skill excludes:

• Resource deployment or infrastructure provisioning
• Security audits
• Cost estimation for resources not yet deployed

Installation

npx skills add https://github.com/microsoft/azure-skills --skill azure-cost

Mirrored from https://github.com/microsoft/azure-skills — original author: microsoft, license: MIT. This is an unclaimed mirror. Content and ownership transfer to the author when they claim this account.