A recent survey by the FinOps Foundation finds that reducing cloud waste and unused resources is a top priority amongst FinOps teams, irrespective of the cloud service provider being used.
Wastage can be a significant concern in cloud cost management, leading to unnecessary expenses that don’t create any business value for your organization or its customers. The dynamic and flexible nature of cloud services can make it challenging to keep these costs under control – particularly for businesses that still rely largely on manual cost management.
As an Azure user, aligning your cloud costs with business value likely tops your list of concerns, too. To help combat wastage and related rising cloud costs, there are tools available to help manage and optimize Azure cloud spending.
Read on as we break down nine leading Azure cost management tools that can help you get the most out of your Azure spend.
1. ProsperOps
ProsperOps is an automated FinOps tool that helps you cut down on your Azure Cloud costs. Our system runs in the background, working around the clock to save you money — without any manual effort from your team.
With over $2.4 billion in cloud spend under management, ProsperOps helps you take control of your Azure cloud costs and leverage discount plans like Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. The platform is based on a series of algorithms that dynamically create and adjust the optimal portfolio of commitment plans to maximize your cost savings based on usage patterns.
This frees you to focus on more strategic, value-adding tasks instead of manually tracking cloud spending.
Key features
- Autonomous savings management: ProsperOps automates the entire process of optimizing discount instruments, reducing the need for manual intervention. It continuously analyzes usage and adjusts discount instruments through an Adaptive Laddering approach.
- Integration with FinOps workflows: Designed to support FinOps teams, ProsperOps integrates smoothly with your existing workflows. You get actionable insights without disrupting your established processes.
- Multi-cloud support: We don’t just help you with Microsoft Azure. ProsperOps also works seamlessly with other cloud platforms, like AWS and Google Cloud, allowing your business to optimize costs across a multi-cloud environment.
- Zero friction for engineering and finance: ProsperOps requires no changes to infrastructure or architecture. And it operates automatically 24/7, minimizing overhead and distractions for engineering and finance teams. Once set up, ProsperOps runs autonomously, freeing up your team for more high value tasks.
2. Microsoft Cost Management for Azure
As a built-in Azure feature, the Microsoft Cost Management suite fits seamlessly with the Azure infrastructure. Microsoft Cost Management for Azure is a comprehensive toolset designed to help organizations monitor, allocate, and optimize their cloud spending. It enables users to track real-time costs, set budgets, and implement cost-saving measures through advanced analytics, ensuring more efficient resource utilization within the Azure environment.
Key features
- Cost tracking and monitoring: It helps identify high-cost areas and uncovers spending patterns, so you can gain a detailed understanding of where your cloud budget is being allocated in real time.
- Budgeting and alerts: Organizations can set budget thresholds to manage and control spending effectively. This feature sends alerts when spending approaches or exceeds defined limits, allowing teams to take proactive steps to prevent overspending.
- Cost allocation: With cost allocation, users can categorize and group resources using tags, which helps in organizing expenses across different departments, projects, or teams. This allows for accurate chargebacks, ensuring each department or team can be billed appropriately for their cloud usage.
- Cost optimization recommendations: This feature analyzes your Azure environment and provides automatic recommendations for optimizing costs, such as resizing or shutting down underutilized resources, transitioning to reserved instances, or eliminating idle resources.
3. CloudZero
CloudZero is a cloud cost intelligence platform designed to give engineers and finance teams more visibility and control in the cloud. It combines highly granular consumption details with powerful data visualization to provide a fully transparent cost management tool. CloudZero focuses on granular cost analysis, going beyond basic cost tracking with detailed insights into how resources and code impact an organization’s cloud spend.
Key features
- Automated cost allocation: Automatically allocates costs to specific products, features, and teams, giving you a clear picture of where your money is going.
- Real-time cost monitoring: Instant alerts about unusual spending patterns or budget overruns so you can quickly take action to prevent costly surprises.
- Cost anomaly detection: Uses AI to identify unusual spending patterns and flags potential issues before they become significant problems.
4. VMware Tanzu CloudHealth
VMware Tanzu CloudHealth provides granular visibility into cloud resources, supports the full lifecycle management of Reserved Virtual Machine Instances, and offers cost-saving recommendations. Additionally, it streamlines decision-making through custom reports and automates operational tasks with governance policies to maintain resource efficiency and security.
Key features
- Cost visibility: Get detailed breakdowns of your Azure spending across different teams, projects, and resources.
- Optimization recommendations: CloudHealth analyzes your usage patterns and suggests ways to improve resource utilization to eliminate waste and reduce costs.
- Custom reporting: Create tailored reports and dashboards for different teams, such as engineering, IT, and finance.
- Governance policies: Set up automated policies to enforce cost controls and compliance across your Azure environment. This keeps your spending in check without constant manual oversight.
- Multi-cloud support: If you’re using multiple cloud providers, CloudHealth can manage them all in one place. This gives you a unified view of your entire cloud infrastructure under one roof.
5. Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor is a native tool that gives users personalized recommendations based on their cloud configurations. This eliminates the guesswork when optimizing Azure deployments and helps to improve the availability, performance, and security of cloud resources.
The tool also creates a range of recommendations based on current consumption trends. It can suggest when to apply Azure Reservations and Savings Plans to accounts, where to remove idle resources, how to manage the deallocation of virtual machines (VMs), and more.
Users can access their suggestions using a personalized dashboard and receive step-by-step instructions to help them execute each recommendation.
Key features
- Personalized Recommendations: Offers tailored advice on improving cloud resource performance, availability, and security based on your Azure setup.
- Cost Optimization: Suggests ways to apply Azure Reservations and Savings Plans, remove idle resources, and optimize virtual machines to reduce costs.
- Performance and Security Enhancements: Provides actionable recommendations to improve system resilience and security posture.
- Dashboard with Step-by-Step Guidance: Users can access recommendations via a custom dashboard, complete with step-by-step instructions for easy implementation.
6. CAST AI
CAST AI delivers intelligent Kubernetes automation that claims to reduce your costs by over 50%. The platform continuously monitors your clusters in real time and applies changes as needed to optimize your configuration for maximum cost efficiency and performance.
It’s an all-in-one solution that combines cost monitoring, autoscaling, and rightsizing, along with automated security, to enhance your DevOps efforts and help you run your containers confidently.
Key features
- Cloud cost optimization: Reduces Kubernetes costs through automated scaling, provisioning, and bin packing.
- Kubernetes cost monitoring: Provides real-time visibility into expenses, allowing users to monitor costs across clusters, workloads, and labels.
- Kubernetes and container security: Offers automated remediation to secure containers and applications, enhancing overall security posture.
- AI enabler: Helps you balance performance and cost-effectiveness when deploying large language models (LLMs) for generative AI.
- Automated scaling: Adjusts resources dynamically based on workload demands, ensuring efficient resource utilization and performance.
- Multi-cloud support: Offers seamless integration and management across multiple cloud providers for more flexibility and no vendor lock-in.
7. Densify
Densify offers advanced resource optimization for compute and container environments, focusing on platforms like Kubernetes. They specialize in optimizing resource management across systems like containers, pods, replica sets, and clusters.
Densify applies machine learning at every layer of your cloud infrastructure, and ensures that applications get the needed resources to maximize efficiency, performance, and uptime.
Key features
- Predictive analytics and machine learning: Uses machine learning to analyze workload patterns and provide precise recommendations for resource allocation.
- Multi-cloud support: Manages resources across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other cloud providers.
- Auto scaling group optimization: Analyzes and optimizes the configuration of Auto Scaling groups to ensure they scale efficiently with changing workloads.
- Kubernetes and OpenShift support: Provides deep analysis and IT cost optimization for container environments, including Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift.
- Automated node group optimization: Recommends optimal instance types and scaling parameters for container nodes based on utilization patterns.
8. Ternary
Ternary is a multi-cloud FinOps platform that helps businesses make sense of their cloud billing data. It aggregates and normalizes data across all your cloud environments, turning it into a standardized schema that stakeholders across the organization can understand.
It’s an invaluable solution for companies that struggle to visualize cloud expenses and how they relate to and support broader business goals. With better visibility into cloud costs across the board, teams can collaborate more effectively and work together to maximize the ROI on their cloud investments.
Key features
- Multi-cloud support: Ternary integrates with all major cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, for a unified view of cloud expenditures.
- Cost visualization and analysis: The platform provides detailed insights into cloud spending, making it simple for users to identify cost drivers and optimization opportunities.
- Anomaly detection: Using machine learning, Ternary detects unexpected changes or irregularities in cloud spend, so you can investigate and resolve them before they become problems.
- Alerting and case management: Users can configure alerting rules based on dollar and percentage thresholds and manage cases within the platform to track and address cost anomalies or optimization opportunities.
- Workload optimization: Ternary also delivers rightsizing recommendations to help you optimize your resources, eliminate waste, and maximize your cost savings.
Best Microsoft Azure Cost Optimization Tool: ProsperOps
ProsperOps delivers cloud savings-as-a-service and leverages its Autonomous Discount Management platform to optimize Microsoft Azure’s native discounts to reduce your cloud spend and place you in the 98th percentile of FinOps teams.
Using advanced data analytics, ProsperOps can continuously analyze your company’s Azure usage patterns to identify inefficiencies and autonomously manage a portfolio of commitments. With our Adaptive Laddering approach, we safely increase coverage while minimizing lock-in risk from commitments.
By blending your discount instruments, such as Azure Savings Plans, and Azure Reserved VM Instances, we help you maximize Effective Savings Rate while lowering Commitment Lock-in Risk. We remove the effort, latency, and lock-in risk associated with manually managing rigid, long-term commitments and fully automate cloud rate optimization for you.
With ProsperOps automation, there is no impact on engineering. Our platform setup is quick, and our systems work behind the scenes to optimize your cloud costs. This allows your teams to concentrate on innovation and growth while we automate cloud cost optimization for you.
To see ProsperOps in action, book a demo today.
