Azure Cost Management Monitoring

Starter

Professional

Bleemeo collects subscription-level cost metrics from Azure Cost Management (not Azure Monitor — cost data isn’t exposed as an Azure Monitor metric). Metrics are polled once daily.

Metrics

All three metrics carry the item amortized.

Metric	Description
account_cost	Amortized cost of the last complete day
account_cost_current	Amortized month-to-date cost
account_cost_forecast	Forecasted amortized cost for the end of the current month

Currency

These metrics carry no currency suffix (unlike their AWS counterparts, which really are returned in USD): Azure reports cost in the subscription’s own billing currency and Bleemeo does not convert it. The currency is published alongside as the cost_currency agent fact on the Account resource.

Amortized cost

Bleemeo queries Azure for amortized cost, so reservation and savings-plan purchases are spread across their term instead of appearing entirely on their purchase date. Expect these metrics to differ from the actual cost shown on your Azure invoice if you own reservations or savings plans.

Note

account_cost reports the last complete day, not the current one: Cost Management lags several hours behind, so today’s figure would be a fraction of the real cost. It shares a single Cost Management query with account_cost_current.

The Account resource is only created once Cost Management actually returns cost data for the subscription — subscriptions with no billing activity yet, or on an unsupported offer type, won’t show an Account resource.

Permissions

Requires the Monitoring Reader role on the subscription — see Permissions Summary. No additional role is needed for Cost Management data specifically: Monitoring Reader grants */read, which already covers every Cost Management read operation.

Note

The subscription’s Azure offer must be supported by Cost Management — some offers (e.g. Azure Sponsorship, Azure for Students, CSP) are excluded regardless of the roles granted. See Microsoft’s list of supported and unsupported offers.

Estimated Azure Cost

Free. Azure bills no meter for Cost Management API queries.

In steady state Bleemeo makes 2 Cost Management calls per day: one cost query (shared by account_cost and account_cost_current) and one forecast query. Until the Account resource exists, Bleemeo additionally probes once per hour to check whether cost data has become available; that probe stops for good once the resource is created.

Both figures stay far below Microsoft’s documented limit of 600 calls per hour.

See Also

• Configuration — set up Azure credentials and permissions