Billing and usage

Purpose

• Review your account's resource costs and usage over a selected date range.
• Break costs down by resource group or by component.
• See totals at a glance with summary cards and donut charts.
• Track cost trends over time at daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly granularity.

Prerequisites

• Minimum permission to view: organisation.billing.read
• This page shows billing for your active account only; cross-tenant billing is under Multi-tenancy → Billing.
• Costs are shown in GBP.

View account billing

1. Open Organisation → Billing.
2. Set the date range; the view defaults to the last 30 days.
3. Review the summary cards for total cost, the VM cost split (vCPU versus RAM), and the disk cost trend.
4. Expected result: the page shows usage and cost for the selected period.

Break down costs

1. Open Organisation → Billing.
2. Under Cost Breakdown, switch between the By Resource Group and By Component tabs.
3. Expand rows in the cost matrix to drill into individual resources.
4. Use the donut chart and cost trend chart to compare contributions and changes over time.
5. Expected result: costs are grouped by your chosen dimension for the selected range.

Filter billing

1. Open Organisation → Billing.
2. Use the filter to narrow by Resource Group or Component.
3. Adjust the date range to change the reporting period and chart granularity.
4. Review the Billing Detail table for per-resource cost and usage (vCPU-hours, RAM GB-hours, disk GB-hours).
5. Clear filters to return to the full view.
6. Expected result: the charts, matrix, and detail table update to match the active filters.

Best Practices

• Tag resources into resource groups so cost breakdowns stay meaningful.
• Widen the date range to see weekly, monthly, or yearly trends instead of daily noise.
• Compare the vCPU and RAM split to right-size over-provisioned machines.
• Use the Billing Detail table to identify the resources driving cost.