Stop Being Surprised by Your Azure Bill: Use Budgets

When organizations migrate workloads to Azure, the focus is usually on architecture, performance, and security. Cost management should be part of that conversation—but in practice, it’s often treated as an afterthought. One of the most overlooked and underutilized tools in Azure is Budgets, despite the fact that it can prevent unpleasant billing surprises with minimal effort.

The Problem: “Surprise!! Please pay your bill.”

Azure’s consumption-based pricing is both a strength and a risk. Teams spin up resources quickly, environments grow, and before long the monthly invoice looks very different than expected. The most common pattern I see is:

Budgets are not configured; alerts are disabled (or non-existent) or sent to the wrong people
Resource consumption skyrockets unbeknownst to anybody
Very large bill shows up at the end of the month, mass chaos ensues
Immediate cost reviews happen – after the bill arrives

Of course, by this time, the damage is already done and it’s time to pay the piper. Sometimes, just sometimes, Microsoft will forgive excessive bills depending on the circumstances , however, that is 100% not guaranteed and solely up to Microsoft discretion.

What Azure Budgets Actually Do

Azure Budgets allow you to define spending thresholds at multiple scopes—subscription, resource group, or management group—and trigger alerts when costs exceed defined percentages of that budget.

Some key capabilities include:

Monthly, quarterly, or annual budget tracking
Alerting at multiple defined thresholds
Notifications sent to distribution lists or individuals
Budgets based on actual or forecasted costs

Here is an example budget that I created for my tenant. It’s set for 80% of the actual costs for a $1,000 monthly budget and it is configured to send me an email whenever I exceed $800.

The overall process to setup the budget is pretty easy and straightforward. If you want to read more on them, check out this Microsoft Learn Article.

Budget Recommendations

If you’re just getting started—or revisiting budgets—this approach might work well for you, but feel free to adjust as necesary –

Create budgets at multiple levels
Start at the subscription level, then add resource-group budgets for major workloads. This allows you to keep an eye on spend at various levels of the tenant.
Set alerts before you hit the limit
For new workloads where costs are not yet realized, set limits lower to identify overruns sooner, such as 25%. For stable workloads, you can push that limit up to a higher boundary, like 80%.
Notify groups, not individuals
People change roles. Distribution lists don’t.
Pair budgets with automation
Alerts can trigger runbooks, emails, or even remediation actions. Automations can manipulate resources to help reduce costs, such as shutting down virtual machines or scaling down other resources as appropriate.

Summary

Azure Budgets won’t optimize your environment for you—but they will tell you when something is going wrong, early enough to do something about it. That visibility is often the difference between a small correction and a painful post-mortem invoice from Microsoft. Budgets are one of the simplest controls you can put in place to help provide goverance—and one of the most commonly overlooked.

Are you using budgets in your environment? Have a story where budgets saved you from a large Azure bill? If so, drop me a comment and let me know! Also stay tuned for a future posts where I investigate using Azure policies to enforce budgets!

The post Stop Being Surprised by Your Azure Bill: Use Budgets first appeared on John Morehouse.