Moving to public cloud such as Azure, AWS or even private cloud services you need to be tracking costs and seeing if you are “effective”. What is the best way of doing this with Microsoft Azure?

I would say Costs Management Labs ( in combination with the idea of tagging)  – for me personally I have been using it to get an analysis across my Data Estate, you know, SQL Virtual machines to Azure SQL DB.

Let’s focus on the first option. Analyse cloud costs. By default, you will see you can drill down (on your subscription) to different views, such as cost by resource.

From this you can then apply a filter on TAGS. Yes, therefore when you build services you should TAG them. I am sure there are other benefits of tagging but filter costs on your tags is a great way to get a cost of a logical grouping of resources for your solutions.

Enter the relevant tag filter

And get the tag cost.