I had quite a lot to do the last couple of weeks and I barely found time to continue my journey to become an Azure Solutions Architect. My free subscription ended and Microsoft asks me kindly to do an upgrade.
Understanding the Costs
I want to understand costs better! I guess this is something everyone wants to know who uses their own credit card. So the first thing I did was to delete all my resources without thinking too much, I had nothing worth keeping.
As the costs for me at the moment are a bit unpredictible I wanted to be sure not to spend too much money. In the costs management of the subscription I stumbled upon cost alerts. Sounds like a good start!
Cost Alerts
Here is a step by step guide on how I created my firt budget with a cost alert.
First we open the subscription. On the left side navigation we will see “Cost alerts”. The view wil be empty, as there are no cost alerts yet, but from there we can create a new budget.
The is empty, as there are no cost alerts yet, but from there we can create a new budget.
This will open the creation form and I think it is quite obvious what we can configure here.
If we scroll down a little bit, we will see a summary of the costs so far. This may help to define a meaningful budget.
On the next page we can now define the actual alerts. I decided to alert me once I spend a small amount of money. The alert should be sent to my email address.
Conclusion
Creating a budget and cost alerts is quite simple. I miss an option to send a test email to see if it passes all spam filters and to get a feeling what information I would get. If Microsoft would take this up, would be a useful extension I believe.