Azure Savings Plans (SP) provide a powerful mechanism to reduce hourly rates in return to committing to ongoing usage. With this release Cloudability provides detailed reporting for all cost items related to SP purchases and consumption. This has been implemented in a manner consistent with how we handle Azure reserved instances. An important aspect of this is categorizing these cost items across reporting dimensions:

• Transaction type: upfront, usage and recurring charges
• Lease Type: Savings Plan

These dimensions make it straightforward to filter or group SP related costs across your entire cloud spend. We’ve also recorded the unique ID of the SP for each cost item in the Reservation ID dimension, enabling users to fully audit the consumption of any SP.

Several reporting metrics have been updated to support Azure SPs. These include cost metrics. For all upfront savings plans the following cost metrics represent:

• Cost (Total): the payment for upfront charges, $0 for usage/recurring
• Cost (Amortized): consumed (usage) and unused (recurring) SPs, $0 for upfront
• Cost (List): the public on demand cost for usage, $0 for upfront/recurring

The Reserved Hours and Reserved Coverage Rate metrics also now support SPs, helping users understand what percentage of their usage is covered by commitments.

Example Summary Report

Here is an example summary report for the month of October that is filtered based on Lease Type = Savings Plan for Azure spend.

Looking at these three rows we can glean some important information about what has occurred during October. The first row, our one-time charge, indicates the upfront cost of purchasing the savings plan which has a unique ID starting with “09a3” of $2,280 (this is a three year $0.10/hr SP). The recurring charge line has zero costs and no usage hours, which indicates that no SP hours are going unused. Finally, our usage line has a cost amortized value of $26.94 which indicates exactly the amount of the SP consumed for the 1739 usage hours. Cost total is zero for the usage line since the cash component was prepaid. 

Example Detailed Report

Here is an example detailed report that is filtered to Azure usage which has been covered by a savings plan.

By using both the reservation ID and resource ID in this report it’s possible to see exactly which VMs are consuming which savings plans. Adding a tag or business dimension to this report, alongside the cost amortized metric demonstrates the ability to charge back consumed savings plan. The cost list metric is another interesting metric to use in a report like this, surfacing the public on-demand cost. The difference between cost amortised and cost list represents the savings made due to custom pricing agreements, reserved instances, and savings plans.

Example multi-cloud reservation coverage report

Here is an example of a multi-cloud report which surfaces the different lease types for “instance usage”

Using this report it’s straightforward to understand what percentage of my instance usage is getting the benefit of savings plans and reserved instances, versus what is running on demand.

Important Note: To get the benefit of this update please ensure your organization has migrated to Azure’s Cost Management Billing Export. This is required to be done before October 5, 2023 due to Microsoft retiring the enterprise billing API.