Cost & commitments

The cost explorer

The Cost tab answers "where does the money go" without sending you back to the Azure portal. At the top: this month so far, last month, a rolling 30-day figure, a forecast, and how much of your run rate the open findings represent.

Below that, a spend trend by month — the current month is marked as partial so you do not read a half-finished month as a drop.

Grouping

Switch Cost by between Type, Resource group, Subscription and Tag. The tag view is the interesting one for chargeback: it shows an explicit (untagged) bucket and a tag-coverage percentage, which is usually the fastest way to discover that a third of your spend cannot be attributed to anyone.

All billed resources

A filterable table of what you are actually billed for — by name, type, resource group, subscription or tag. Each row shows its monthly cost, what a full month would cost at the same rate, its savings potential, and how many findings point at it.

Unattributed spend is called out separately. That is cost Azure reports without a resource behind it — marketplace charges, support plans, and similar. It is real money, it is just not something a finding can act on.

Refreshing cost

↻ Refresh cost (Editor or Admin) queues a cost-only update for the background worker. It is asynchronous — the button reports "queued" and the numbers update when it finishes, usually within a few minutes. A daily or weekly automatic refresh can be set under Settings → Schedule.

Commitments

The Commitments tab addresses the biggest single lever in most Azure bills: paying on-demand rates for machines that never turn off.

Every always-on VM is listed with four numbers side by side — what it costs at on-demand rates, what it actually costs given its real runtime, and what it would cost under a 1-year or 3-year Savings Plan or Reserved Instance. The comparison uses measured runtime, not the assumption that everything runs 24/7, which is what makes it trustworthy for machines that are already partly shut down.

Recording a decision

Each VM gets a decision dropdown (Editor or Admin):

• Reserve 1 yr / 3 yr — commit to a Reserved Instance.
• Savings Plan 1 yr / 3 yr — commit to a compute savings plan.
• Ignore — leave it on demand, deliberately.
• Decommission — it should not exist at all.

Decisions persist across scans, along with who made them and when, so the analysis does not reset every week. Filter chips let you view All, Open, Reserve, Savings Plan or Ignored.

The reservation planner

Everything you marked as Reserve or Savings Plan rolls up into a purchase list, grouped by VM size, region and term — how many of each to buy, the total commitment, and the estimated saving. That grouping is the part Azure's own portal makes you do by hand.

Take the list to Open Reservations in Azure ↗ and buy there. TenantThrift never purchases anything; it holds Reader.

VMs marked Ignore or Decommission drop out of the headline saving, so the number reflects what you actually intend to do.