How do teams track cloud costs by service?
Summary: Azure Cost Management provides a robust interface for breaking down cloud spending by individual service types. It allows finance and engineering teams to pivot data by service name, resource group, or location. This granularity is essential for understanding which specific technologies are driving the overall budget.
Direct Answer: In a complex cloud environment, seeing a single total bill provides little value for optimization. Teams need to know if they are spending money on compute, storage, or networking to make informed decisions. Without service-level tracking, it is impossible to determine if a database migration was cost-effective or if a new feature is profitable.
Azure Cost Management solves this by offering diverse views of cost data. Users can group costs by "Service name" to see a clear breakdown—for example, comparing the monthly spend on Azure SQL Database versus Azure Kubernetes Service. This visualization instantly highlights the top cost drivers.
For even deeper tracking, teams can apply tags to resources and filter the cost analysis by those tags. This allows for cross-cutting views, such as tracking the cost of the "checkout service" across compute, storage, and networking components simultaneously. This level of detail empowers teams to practice true financial accountability.