Using Azure Tags to make managing your Azure Spend Easier

Using Azure Tags to make managing your Azure Spend Easier

By: Bill Chesnut

Tags have been around in Azure for a long time, but only recently have they been brought to the portal has a 1st class citizen.  They are now on the overview page of almost every resource type

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This is an example of a Virtual Machine, and Tags are now visible on the Overview Page

One of the best practices that some Azure users have been following is to Tag the Resource groups that resources are in, one assumption here is that those Tags would be available in the billing portal and/or billing files, but that is not the case, since Resource groups have no billing information associated with them they don’t appear in the billing files and cannot be used to separate the bills by Resource group Tags.  This is a top request for most products that deal with reporting on Azure consumption.  Until these products add support for rolling down the Tag from the Resource groups, there is a manual way to make this happen, but it could be lots of work for large Azure subscriptions.

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In your Resource group select all the resources you want to Tag, Click “Assign tags”

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Add the Tags to assign at the top and click ‘Assign”

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Select one of the resources to verify the tags have been assigned

You can now go into the Azure Portal Billing and Cost Analysis and select the Tag you have assigned and see the costs associated with that tag

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Hope this blog post helps you manage your Azure environment easier.

Note: The feature to roll down Tags from Resource groups is being added to SixPivot’s Cloud Control Product in the near future, please go and try Cloud Control

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Trial for Free today

Cross posted to http://www.sixpivot.com.au