Whether you’re a new student, thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you’re spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management and Billing comes in.

We’re always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Azure Cost Management and Billing can help you better understand where you’re accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Let’s dig into the details.

Introducing the Azure Advisor Score

Wouldn’t it be great to have some assurances that you’re running your workloads in a cost-efficient manner? That’s exactly what Azure Advisor gives you and now, with the Advisor Score, it’s easier than ever for you to understand how well your Azure workloads are following best practices, assess how much you stand to gain by remediating issues and prioritize the most impactful recommendations you can take to optimize your deployments.

Advisor Score will help you:

• Assess how well you’re following the best practices defined by Azure Advisor and the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework.
• Optimize your deployments by taking the most impactful actions first.
• Report on your well-architected progress over time.

Learn more about the Azure Advisor Score and check your score today by visiting Azure Advisor in the Azure portal.

Create subscriptions with ARM templates

As your usage grows and you begin to expand your Azure footprint across multiple subscriptions, you may find situations where you’ll want to create subscriptions programmatically. This is especially important for central IT teams or when you want to make sure you can have a fully-packaged application deployable as a single unit. While you can build a script to accomplish this, Azure Resource Manager (ARM) deployment templates make this easier than ever with a simple, declarative language that manages dependencies and handles orchestration on your behalf. Learn how to create subscriptions using ARM templates and start automating your manual processes to save time.

Tell us what you need when verifying billed charges

As you know, we’re always looking for ways to learn more about your needs and expectations. This month, we’d like to learn more about how you verify your billed charges to actual usage data. We’ll use your inputs to help optimize invoicing experiences in Cost Management and Billing to help you understand and pay your bills faster and easier. The survey should take about 10 minutes.

Take the survey.

What’s new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what’s coming in Azure Cost Management and can engage directly with us to share feedback and help us better understand how you use the service, so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Cost Management Labs:

1. NEW: Scope pill now opens the location of the current scope – Now available in the public portal
2. The scope pill in Cost Management experiences allows you to quickly and easily switch between resource groups, subscriptions, or billing accounts. Now, when you open the scope picker, it defaults to your currently selected scope to make it quicker than ever to switch between scopes.
3. NEW: New cost analysis views for resources and reservations
4. Introducing new, faster cost views that break costs down by resource and reservation. We’re still working on these. You can opt into the new views using Try Preview from Cost Management Labs.
5. Improved getting started
6. Expanded getting started experience covering more options across Cost Management and Billing.

Of course, that’s not all. Every change in Azure Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it’s in the full Azure portal. We’re eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you’d like to see next. What are you waiting for? Try Cost Management Labs today.

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