Top 17 Azure Cost Optimization Tools

While major organizations are adopting Azure as their cloud service provider due to its ability to enable rapid implementation of solutions. However, they often neglect effective cost-saving strategies despite the urgent need to control rising cloud expenses.

Many companies focus solely on compute costs, inadvertently overlooking significant overspending on unoptimized cloud storage.

In this post, we look into various Azure cost optimization tools. Alongside helping you optimize your compute expenses, we will also talk about tools that will assist you in efficiently managing the costs associated with block storage.

Effective cost optimization has become a strategic cornerstone for businesses in the cloud, where resources are virtually limitless and flexible.

While businesses are leveraging the benefits of Azure cloud service, it is essential to understand that it comes with the challenge of managing costs efficiently.

Cost optimization, in this context, refers to aligning your cloud usage with your actual needs, ensuring that you get the most out of your cloud investment without overspending. It focuses on reducing costs and maximizing the value derived from your cloud services.

Now, delving into Azure cost optimization, it’s essential to recognize that Azure provides a wealth of tools and strategies tailored to help businesses manage their cloud expenditure effectively.

Organizations have shifted to Azure for scalability, agility, and potential cost savings. However, cloud spending can spiral out of control without proper cost optimization strategies.

While Azure equips users with native tools for cost management, these tools overlook the cost associated with storage usage that hamper productivity and return on investment in the long run.

Hence, we suggest investing in multiple Azure cost optimization tools. Each tool optimizes various aspects, such as compute resources and storage usage. 

While organizations leave no stone unturned in their attempt to bring down the overall Azure cost by optimizing compute resources, they overlook the cost associated with storage usage.

Microsoft Azure has five different types of storage divided into two categories. 

The initial set consists of Queue Storage, Table Storage, and Blob Storage. These services are developed with a focus on efficient file storage, scalability, and effortless communication. They can be conveniently accessed via the REST API, making them suitable for various applications. 

The subsequent set encompasses File Storage and Disk Storage, specifically designed to improve the capabilities of Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines. These services can only be accessed from within VMs and are valuable assets for optimizing the Azure VM environment.

Why are we emphasizing managed disk storage usage and associated costs?

Let’s break it down for you.

Storage is one of the most essential cost components in the Azure environment. Out of the various storage resources available, disk storage is the one that is accountable for a significant portion of the overall cloud cost.

The cost of managed disk makes up 15% of total cloud expenses, yet it is frequently left unattended in this age of data.

Hence, understanding and optimizing the managed disk cost is necessary for maximum savings. The following will help you understand why you should consider managed disk when optimizing cloud cost.

• Increasing your disk storage costs directly relates to the number and size of disks you provision. By allocating larger disks or provisioning multiple disks, you will increase your costs by the same amount.
  In contrast, services like Blob Storage charge based on the amount of data stored rather than how much capacity they provide.
• Different disks are available in Azure (e.g., Standard HDD, Standard SSD, Premium SSD, Ultra Disk), each with different performance characteristics. Higher-performance disks incur higher costs, but other storage options, such as Blob Storage, can be more cost-effective.
• A snapshot or a backup of disks can lead to additional storage costs. Other Azure storage services, such as Azure Backup for virtual machines, offer more cost-effective backup solutions.
• When you transfer data between disks or between disks and Azure services, data transfer costs can increase, but other types of Azure storage, like Blob Storage, offer more flexibility and are often cheaper.
• In your cloud infrastructure, managed disks can be a significant cost component, especially if you run several virtual machines with varying storage requirements.
• Over time, unneeded or unused disks can accumulate costs, which can be reduced by managing disk lifecycles, such as creating, resizing, and deleting them.

While the reasons above should compel you to expand your cost optimization efforts to storage and compute resources, if you want data to corroborate our findings, let's dive into it.

A study conducted by Virtana on “State of the Hybrid Cloud Storage” revealed that out of 350 respondents, 94% said that their cloud storage cost is increasing, with 54% further attesting that compared to their overall cloud cost, the storage spend is increasing and growing.

Despite this, organizations often neglect storage optimization because it necessitates creating custom tools. This is because cloud service providers lack features in this area.

However, crafting these custom tools demands significant time and effort from the DevOps team.

Conversely, relying solely on cloud service providers' tools can result in inefficiencies. These tools demand extensive manual work and resource-intensive tasks, making them unsuitable for every day, continuous operations.

Ignoring storage-related costs and lack of storage cost optimization in Azure can lead to the following:

• Ignoring storage-associated costs means ignoring aspects contributing to inefficient storage usage, like overprovisioning or underutilizing resources. These practices can result in unnecessary expenses, where you might end up paying for resources you don’t need or are not using.
• Insufficient attention to storage can result in ineffective data handling, causing difficulty locating and utilizing information efficiently. This can have a detrimental impact on productivity and decision-making processes. 
• Neglecting storage also increases the likelihood of inadequate backup and recovery plans for your data. In situations where data loss or disasters occur, crucial information may become irretrievable, posing risks to business continuity. 
• Overlooking the costs associated with storage can diminish the returns on investment from Azure. Consequently, wasteful expenditure can prevent you from fully leveraging the benefits of utilizing Azure effectively.
• Organizations keep no longer needed or actively used data without realizing that it continues to accrue storage costs. Ignoring storage usage can result in budget overruns. Developing a strategy for optimizing storage usage is crucial to reducing these costs.

It is essential to implement storage and other cost-optimizing tools to avoid the aforementioned negative impacts. This blog will cover all the major Azure cost optimization tools that come with advanced features and capabilities.

Some concentrate on optimizing compute resources, while others target storage, empowering you to derive maximum value from both resources and storage. These external tools expand your options, enabling you to fine-tune your cost-saving strategies and optimize resource allocation with higher precision and efficiency.

How To Choose The Right Azure Cost Optimization Tool?

While there are a plethora of Azure cost optimization tools available in the market, it is essential that you are judicious in your search and have knowledge of the must-have features. This ensures you maintain maximum control over your expenses and enhance the efficiency of your Azure storage and management processes. 

It is important to note that while some tools offer compute resource optimization, some focus on storage usage optimization, and there will also be tools that will offer visibility and reporting features.

Hence, you must implement 2-3 Azure cost optimization tools based on your requirements. To aid your selection process, here are some tips to help you pinpoint the perfect Azure cost optimization tool for your requirements.

A holistic focus on all these three factors significantly contributing to the overall Azure bill can prove instrumental in effective Azure cost optimization.

Also, Check: Tools that offer compute resources optimization, storage optimization, and visibility should be your prime focus whether you leverage a single-cloud environment like AWS, Azure, or GCP or your workload is on a multi-cloud environment.

Our cloud cost optimization tools blog comprehensively covers this categorization and provides the right tool option depending on your requirement, control, or adequate resource allocation. With 20+ cloud cost optimization tools, we aim to narrow down your search and ensure that you get the most out of your cents.

Best Azure Cost Optimization Tools

Now that you know the crucial features for Azure cost optimization tools, let's explore some of the top solutions available. Each tool concentrates on specific areas such as compute resources, storage, or providing valuable insights. 

Organizations increasingly migrate their data to cloud platforms, making storage optimization tools even more essential. This tool enhances performance, scalability, and data accessibility while reducing costs.

1. Lucidity - For Storage Optimization 

Lucidity revolutionizes cloud storage operations, offering organizations a seamless way to optimize their block storage usage. By acting as a NoOps solution, it streamlines operations, saving precious DevOps time and eliminating downtime, all while reducing costs.  

The industry’s first NoOps disk auto-scaler is an extra layer over your block storage. It automates capacity planning and provisioning, boosting disk utilization and cutting overhead costs. 

With Lucidity in place, businesses can confidently handle surges in demand. They enjoy uninterrupted storage, ensuring they never run out of disk space, even during peak usage, providing a hassle-free storage experience.

Why Do Businesses Need A Managed Disk Auto-Scaler?

We researched to find out where the businesses leveraging Azure as their cloud service are going wrong and why they need a managed disk auto-scaler. We found out:

• Overprovisioning: 65% of the managed disk utilization for root volume, application disk, and self-hosted database is over-provisioned.
  This occurs as organizations often anticipate disk growth without fully understanding the comprehensive impact of their actions. 
  Allocating more storage capacity and compute resources than required results in an inflating infrastructure cost since you are paying for either underutilized or unutilized resources.
  Upon further investigation, we found out that the primary goal of any organization is to maintain uptime without causing any performance lag in the application.
  In such a situation, overprovisioning seems like a safer option because creating a separate custom tool for optimizing storage would mean investing significant time and effort in the DevOps team.
  Conversely, utilizing tools provided by cloud service providers proves inefficient, demanding extensive manual intervention and resource-intensive work. This approach not only hinders productivity but also jeopardizes the return on investment.
  For instance, you need a tool that can expand/shrink without any downtime and as many times as you want.

• Buffer: We understand the need for organizations to deliberately allocate additional storage capacity beyond what is required to ensure enough storage space as and when required without affecting performance.
  However, you might have a hefty cloud bill since you are paying for the storage you are not using immediately.

The attempts to improve the 65% buffer become difficult for the organization since it involves manual intervention at various stages.

Moreover, when you need less storage, you will have to invest significant time in disk shrinkage, leading to roughly 4 hours of downtime to shrink a 1TB disk. Additionally, a manual disk upgrade might require an average of 3 hours.

• Downtime: Despite the heavy overprovisioning, most organizations face one downtime per quarter because their disk ran out of space. Aside from impacting the revenue, downtime disrupts the business operation and leads to decreased productivity. Moreover, this situation can potentially escalate, causing significant reputational damage.

How Can Lucidity Help?

In contrast to other tools in the market that primarily focus on compute resources, Lucidity prioritizes the efficient management and optimization of storage expenditures. 

We understand that the conventional methods for scaling storage resources lead to excessive provisioning, inadequate provisioning, or wastage of resources, leading to significant performance issues.

Moreover, in traditional methods, finding the right balance between overprovisioning and underprovisioning often leads to downtime and performance bottlenecks.

We understand that with the predicament of organizations choosing to overprovision and the consistent effort to minimize downtime. Hence, we at Lucidity aim to make cloud storage management efficient and hassle-free.

With our managed disk services, you are billed only for the resources you utilize, resulting in up to a 70% reduction in disk costs.

Introducing Lucidity’s Managed Disk Auto-Scaler!

Our Block Storage Auto-Scaler effortlessly scales in real-time and has the ability to automatically expand within 1 minute of the spike in traffic/workload and shrink seamlessly, meeting the varying demands of the applications and the workloads.

We transform how businesses manage resources and costs by reflecting ROI for storage as little as 50GB. 

Whether there is an unexpected surge in traffic or you want to streamline expenses during slower periods, our Managed Disk Auto-Scaler will dynamically fine-tune your storage capacity, ensuring peak performance and cost-effectiveness. 

With just three simple clicks, we will help you cut your storage cost by up to 70% without causing downtime or performance hiccups. We ensure optimum provisioning by automating the expansion and shrinkage of the disk.

What Are The Benefits Of Our Managed Disk Auto-Scaler?

Our Managed Disk Auto-Scaler, which works as an additional layer over your cloud deployment, will ensure you never run out of space.

With Lucidity, you can move as many apps as possible to the cloud without remodeling your architecture or making any application coding changes. Mentioned below are some of the benefits of installing Lucidity in your system.

Quick, and easy to implement with no downtime: Lucidity's Managed Disk Auto-Scaler is designed for effortless deployment, requiring just three clicks to install. Experience seamless expansion and contraction without any buffer time, downtime, or performance bottlenecks. 

To enhance uptime reliability, Lucidity allows you to create customized policies. These policies allow you to automate the storage optimization process by setting your preferred disk utilization and buffer, ensuring you never face storage shortages. 

Establishing policies in Lucidity is straightforward; users can input policy details by clicking "Create Policy," such as the policy name, desired utilization, maximum disk size, and buffer size.

Each policy can be tailored to meet specific usage and loading conditions, ensuring that Lucidity manages instances in line with the designated policies, optimizing performance and cost-effectiveness.

By eliminating the need for manual intervention, we will help your DevOps team save time and effort and focus more on critical tasks.

Save up to 70% on storage costs: Lucidity's cutting-edge cloud-first block storage solution revolutionizes the way businesses manage cloud storage costs. With Lucidity, you can witness ROI as early as 50GB of storage.

Using Lucidity's innovative features, businesses can save up to 70% on block storage expenses. By combining Auto-Scaler with intelligent auto-tiering, deduplication, and compression, businesses are able to optimize storage costs while maintaining high performance.

With Lucidity, you can also understand how much you can save with our ROI calculator once you use Lucidity.

To see, select your cloud vendor as Azure and then you just have to enter your annual average cloud cost, how much of your hard drive capacity is taken up at any moment, and the expected future increase in data generation.

Then, Lucidity would reveal the other savings you might have forgotten about. This is key to maximizing the optimal use of your cloud resources and smart management of your costs.

Seamless expansion and shrinkage: With Lucidity's Auto-Scaler, you can seamlessly adapt your storage resources to your workload's specific requirements, regardless of sudden spikes or low storage usage.

Within 1 minute of the requirement being raised, Lucidity begins automated expansion process. Conversely, in period of low requirements, it seamlessly shrink the storage resources.

How Do We Go About The Process?

With our pioneering auto-scaling solution, your business can improve its cloud resources' performance and cost management, eliminating the complexity of managing resources.

At Lucidity, we offer effortless, budget-friendly, high-performance storage by intelligently identifying usage patterns and automatically adjusting resource allocation, ensuring seamless operations without the complexities typically associated with managing resources.

Mentioned below is how we go about the cost optimization process with our Storage Audit and Managed Disk Auto-Scaler.

We start with our storage discovery process with our free-to-use Lucidity Storage Audit, conducting a thorough storage analysis to identify the root cause of resource wastage and cloud cost spend.

Our storage discovery process will give you visibility of the following aspects of cloud storage and cost in just 1 week with little to no effort:

• Overall Disk Spend: Our audit process will help you get clarity on your current disk expenditures, what can be the ideal billing structure, and which strategies can help you cut down the cloud storage cost by up to 70%.
• Disk Wastage: Our audit will help you uncover the root cause of idle, underutilized, and overprovisioned resources so that you can take prompt actions to eliminate the financial repercussions they lead to.
• Disk Downtime Risk: We will help you prevent the possibility of downtime by sending you alerts as to when they are about to happen. 

How Have We Enhanced SpartanNash Insights Into Their Cloud Spending?

We also helped SpartanNash realize how much they lost to overprovisioning and ineffective capacity planning.

Like many organizations transitioning to the cloud, SpartanNash struggled to monitor their storage service expenses despite constituting 15% of their overall cloud costs. Since they could not evaluate it, they lost a significant amount.

SpartanNash, like many organizations, adhered to the industry practice of maintaining a 50% buffer default. This approach aimed to prevent downtime, manage peak loads efficiently, and alleviate the workload on the DevOps team.

However, we stepped in to challenge this complacency and provide valuable insights into their cloud spending patterns. 

Take a look at what Jay Dhakar, Cloud Migration Architect of SpartanNash, has to say about the challenges they faced and how Lucidity helped them.

We understand this predicament since capacity management can be a challenging task due to numerous applications of block storage across root volumes, application servers, and databases.

What often goes unnoticed is the ballooning cost, significantly impacting your financial resources. This underscores the importance of conducting a comprehensive audit. 

SpartanNash was well aware of the fact that they were overspending on their cloud storage. The limitations of the native cloud vendor does not offer the functionality of an increasing disk without downtime, and they could not shrink their disk when the provisioning requirements were less than regular.

This is when they came to us to help them offer visibility into their spending and eliminate unnecessary expenses. 

Upon performing our audit for SpartanNash, we found out that:

• Their average disk utilization was a mere 17%, primarily because 85% of their storage was overprovisioned.
• Upon further investigation, it was discovered that despite having monitoring agents, one of their instances was on the edge of facing downtime due to the absence of alerts set up for such critical situations.

Once our audit report highlighted the problems, SpartanNash was quick to resolve them, thus preventing themselves from financial and reputational damage.

If you struggle to improve your disk utilization and optimize your overall cloud spend, Lucidity’s managed disk auto scaler can help you significantly bring down your cloud cost.

Azure Cost Optimization Tools - Native Tools

By using native Azure cost optimization tools, businesses of all sizes can navigate the complex world of Azure’s expenditures, monitoring, analyzing, and controlling costs while optimizing performance and resource utilization.

2. Azure Cost Management and Billing

Azure Cost Management and Billing–a comprehensive tool for understanding spending on Azure usage. It is central to monitoring and managing costs on the cloud via Azure portal integration. 

It will help improve the return on your cloud investment with its industry best practices and continuous cost optimization.

Additionally, it lets you implement governance policies for effective enterprise cloud cost management and increases accountability with budgets, cost allocation, and chargebacks if needed.

Customer Rating

• G2: 3.9/5

3. Azure Advisor

As the name suggests, Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant aiming to improve Azure resources' cost-efficiency, performance, reliability, and security by analyzing resource configuration, implementing telemetry, and suggesting effective cost-optimization solutions. 

One such solution is to configure an advisor. This helps target specific subscriptions and resource groups to focus on critical optimizations.

It even offers you proactive and actionable recommendations designed to help you save time on cloud optimization by offering actions you can act on, postpone, or dismiss.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.7/5

4. Azure Reservation

With Azure reservations, you can set aside sufficient Azure resources for one to three years in exchange for a massive discount on your pay-as-you-go rates. This cost optimization tool is precious for organizations with consistent and predictable workloads. 

Although the initial investment for an Azure reservation might be higher, it results in substantial savings, up to 72% more than regular pay-as-you-go services.

This makes it an ideal choice for businesses seeking long-term cost efficiency and financial predictability in cloud usage.

5. Azure Spot Virtual Machines

Azure Spot Virtual Machines utilize any extra compute capacity left over within Azure’s data centers whenever there is an excess in the data centers. This feature taps into unused resources typically available for most VM types except those designated for on-demand use. 

With Azure Spot VMs, users can access these available resources at a lower cost than standard on-demand VMs, providing a cost-effective solution for diverse computing needs.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.4/5

6. Azure Cost Calculator

Azure Cost Calculator is a user-friendly, web-based tool provided by Azure, that allows users to calculate the comprehensive costs associated with running workloads on the Azure cloud platform. 

It offers insights into various elements, such as different virtual machine configurations, storage requirements, networking usage, and the costs associated with running specific Azure services. 

Customer rating

• G2: 4/5

Azure Cost Optimization Tools - Visibity & Reporting

Cloud cost structures, driven by pay-as-you-go models and the variety of services that cloud providers offer, requires a robust and comprehensive approach to cost management. This is where these tools will serve as an invaluable resource.

7. Cloudability by Apptio

A cloud cost and optimization tool, Cloudability by Apptio, is designed to bring financial accountability to the organization, which relies on the dynamic nature of the cloud. By identifying discrepancies and optimizing cloud expenditures, Cloudability ensures that the financial resources are utilized efficiently. 

Additionally, it offers continuous monitoring and governance of cloud consumption, providing businesses with real-time insights to make informed decisions and maintain cost-effectiveness in their cloud operations.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.2/5

8. Serverless360

Using the Serverless360 tool in the cloud infrastructure enables businesses to allocate costs per environment, customer, team, or other projects. This capability equips companies with essential data for informed decision-making and efficient optimization of their cloud resources. 

Serverless360 offers comprehensive visibility through its cost analyzer, enabling businesses to identify specific areas where Azure costs can be reduced. Detailed insights play a vital role in helping organizations optimize their Azure expenses and enhance overall cost efficiency.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.7/5

9. CloudHealth

CloudHealth, as an enterprise cost management tool, operates as a conventional solution tailored to assist large organizations in efficiently managing their cloud expenses. This versatile tool enables users to control their cloud bills effectively and gives them the flexibility to bolster Azure security. 

By allowing the implementation of custom policies, CloudHealth empowers enterprises to tailor their security measures according to their specific needs, ensuring a robust and customized approach to managing their Azure environment.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.1/5

10. Spot

A NetApp product, Spot aims to ensure enhanced performance, maximum scalability, and increased security for organizations leveraging the cloud, ensuring the goal is achieved at the lowest possible cost.

Another way it maximizes the value of your cloud investment is by automating the provisioning and resource management tasks. This leads to minimal manual intervention and uses continuous optimization, automation, and insights to manage cloud spend and optimize cloud commitments to reduce costs with a governed, scalable approach.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.4/5

11. Cast AI

Cast AI combines AI-driven cost management with Kubernetes to provide cost monitoring and reporting services. It is especially beneficial for businesses that aim for continuous Kubernet cost management. It offers real-time autoscaling and spot instances. 

If enabled, the cost is reduced by 60%, and around 75% of the initial cluster cost goes away if your cluster can run on spot instances only. It also provides optimization recommendations and ensures a balance between performance and cost.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.8/5

12. Kubecost

Kubecost is specifically designed for organizations that use Kubernetes to help them maximize their savings by offering real-time visibility and insights into cloud spend and usage. Once you have the insights, you can prioritize key infrastructure or application changes to improve resource efficiency and reliability.

It also provides more detailed insights by integrating with external cloud and infrastructure parameters. This will help you become aware of the cost overruns and infrastructure outage risks before they become a problem with real-time notifications.

Customer Rating

• G2: 5/5

Azure Cost Optimization Tools - Compute Resource Optimization

By using these tools, businesses can meet their performance requirements while optimizing costs while allocating, scaling, and managing compute resources in the cloud.

13. Harness

Designed to help different departments in an organization establish control over cloud spend, Harness cloud cost management provides a perspective on cloud cost spend in context with the objectives of the business.

Besides, it helps you stay updated by providing reports and user-defined alerts you require at various stages of budget consumption. 

It even allows you to set monthly, quarterly, and annual budgets from a cost perspective. Based on its accurate ML-based forecasting, you can track whether your current spending rate will be within budget or not.

Moreover, if it ever detects a cost anomaly, the resource owners would be notified immediately to take action on cost overruns before they spiral out of control. 

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.5/5

14. Virtana

A unified SaaS platform, Virtana is designed to assist organizations in optimizing their cloud resources effectively. Virtana enables users to right-size their resources by preventing overprovisioning or underprovisioning instances, ensuring optimal utilization. 

Additionally, the platform allows users to seamlessly add functionality as needed, promoting flexibility and saving costs by eliminating the need for unnecessary, fixed resources. 

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.5/5

15. Densify

Densify is an advanced predictive analysis software meticulously crafted to curtail cloud costs. Closely monitoring usage patterns identifies areas for cost savings and resource optimization within cloud infrastructures. 

Densify strengthens cost optimization strategies through its sophisticated monitoring capabilities and efficient management of container resources, ensuring organizations maximize their cloud investments while minimizing unnecessary expenses.

Customer Rating

• G2: 3/5

16. Granulate

Granulate is a cutting-edge autonomous cloud workload and cost optimization solution. It stands out by enabling businesses to substantially reduce their cloud costs without requiring any alterations to the existing codebase. 

This innovative technology allows for precise cost optimization at each microservice and container level, regardless of the platform being used, whether it's Azure, Amazon ECS, or Google Cloud.

Granulate's approach ensures seamless efficiency improvements and significant cost savings for businesses across various cloud environments.

Customer Rating

• G2: 5/5

17. CloudZero

CloudZero is a cloud cost optimization platform that provides businesses with a valuable context for every cloud expenditure. Its purpose is to facilitate efficient spending by aligning various departments involved in cloud storage and costs. 

The platform focuses on common factors such as cost per product feature or customer, ensuring that resources are allocated effectively, and expenditures are optimized in alignment with business objectives.

Customer Rating

• G2: 4.5/5

Don’t Let The Cloud Cost Hold You Back! 

With Azure cost optimization tools, organizations can take charge of their spending, ensuring every dollar invested in the cloud delivers maximum value.

By gaining enhanced visibility into resource consumption, companies can achieve substantial cost savings by avoiding excess assets while maintaining peak performance.