Azure

Overview

To use Azure Cloud Cost Management in Datadog, you must set up the Datadog Azure integration and set up amortized and actual exports in Azure. Additionally, Datadog must have permissions to read the exports from the container.

Datadog provides cost visibility on a Subscription, Resource Group, and Billing Account Level. Microsoft Customer Agreements (MCA) can only set up at the Subscription level. Pay as you go (PAYG) and CSP accounts are not supported.

Setup

Configure the Azure integration

Navigate to Setup & Configuration and select an Azure account from the menu to pull costs from. If you do not see your Azure account in the list, view your Azure integration to add your account.

Generate cost exports

You need to generate exports for two data types: actual and amortized. Datadog recommends using the same storage container for both exports.

Navigate to Exports under Azure portal’s Cost Management + Billing.
Select the export scope. Note: The scope must be billing account, subscription, or resource group.
After the scope is selected, click Add.

In Azure portal highlighting Exports option in navigation and the export scope

Select the following Export details:
- Metric: Actual Cost (usage and purchases) THEN Amortized Cost (usage and purchases)
- Export type: Daily export of month-to-date costs
- File Partitioning: On

Export details with Metric: Actual, Export type: Daily, and File Partitioning: On

At this time, there is no support for creating cost exports using the improved exports experience. To disable it, open the Cost Management labs preview features, click on “Go to preview portal” and deselect the “Exports (preview)” option. Then proceed to create the two exports within the Preview Portal.

Choose a storage account, container, and directory for the exports.
- Note: Do not use special characters like . in these fields.
- Note: Billing exports can be stored in any subscription. If you are creating exports for multiple subscriptions, Datadog recommends storing them in the same storage account. Export names must be unique.
Select Create.

For faster processing, generate the first exports manually by clicking Run Now.

Click Run Now button in export side panel to generate exports

Provide Datadog access to your exports

Note: For Microsoft Customer Agreement, set up at the subscription level.

In the Exports tab, click on the export’s Storage Account to navigate to it.
Click the Containers tab.
Choose the storage container your bills are in.
Select the Access Control (IAM) tab, and click Add.
Choose Add role assignment.
Choose Storage Blob Data Reader, then click Next.
Assign these permissions to one of the App Registrations you have connected with Datadog.
- Click Select members, pick the name of the App Registration, and click Select.
- Select review + assign.

If your exports are in different storage containers, repeat steps one to seven for the other storage container.

In the Exports tab, click on the export’s Storage Account to navigate to it.
Click the Containers tab.
Choose the storage container your bills are in.
Select the Access Control (IAM) tab, and click Add.
Choose Add role assignment.
Choose Storage Blob Data Reader, then click Next.
Assign these permissions to one of the App Registrations you have connected with Datadog.
- Click Select members, pick the name of the App Registration, and click Select.
- Select review + assign.

If your exports are in different storage containers, repeat steps one to seven for the other storage container.

Configure Cost Management Reader access

Note: You do not need to configure this access if your scope is Billing Account.

Navigate to your subscriptions and click your subscription’s name.
Select the Access Control (IAM) tab.
Click Add, then Add role assignment.
Choose Cost Management Reader, then click Next.
Assign these permissions to the app registration.

This ensures complete cost accuracy by allowing periodic cost calculations against Microsoft Cost Management.

Configure Cloud Costs in Datadog

Navigate to Setup & Configuration and follow the steps.

Cost types

You can visualize your ingested data using the following cost types:

Cost Type	Description
`azure.cost.amortized`	Cost based on applied discount rates plus the distribution of pre-payments across usage for the discount term (accrual basis).
`azure.cost.actual`	Cost shown as the amount charged at the time of usage (cash basis). Actual costs include private discounts as well as discounts from reserved instances and savings plans as separate charge types.
`azure.cost.discounted.ondemand`	Cost based on the list rate provided by Azure, after privately negotiated discounts. To get the true on-demand cost, divide this metric by (1 - <negotiated_discount>). For example if you have a 5% flat rate discount across all Azure products, taking this metric and dividing by .95 (1-.05) provides the true on-demand price.

Cost and observability correlation

Viewing costs in context of observability data is important to understand how infrastructure changes impact costs, identify why costs change, and optimize infrastructure for both costs and performance. Datadog adds the name tag on cost data for top Azure products to simplify correlating observability and cost metrics.

For example, to view cost and utilization for each Azure VM, you can make a table with azure.cost.amortized and azure.vm.network_in_total (or any other VM metric) and group by name. Or, to see Storage usage and costs side by side, you can filter into metercategory:Storage and graph azure.storage.transactions and azure.cost.amortized grouped by name.

Getting historical data

You can create historical data in your storage account using the Microsoft API or by creating a support ticket with Microsoft to have them backfill cost data. Cloud Cost Management automatically pulls in up to 15 months of historical data as long as the file structure and partitioning follows the format of scheduled exports.