Define Budget & Configure Cost center quotas - Azure

There are several types of quotas that are applicable to subscriptions, including resource quotas and spending quotas. We can easily see all the resource consumption and quotas from subscription node in the portal and also request to increase quota if needed by clicking button on the same page at the top.


Submitting a request to increase a quota is only submitting a support request to Microsoft. Microsoft Support must respond to the request, and while most requests are granted, it is not guaranteed that a quota increase will be granted.

Please see below

There are also spending quotas in Azure. Spending quotas allow administrators to set alerts within an Azure subscription by configuring budgets to inform the business when their Azure spending has hit a certain threshold.

 These differ slightly from limits. Where a resource limit can stop resources from being created (e.g. there are not enough cores available to the subscription in the desired region) a spending quota acts as an alerting mechanism and does not stop resources from being created or consumed. While an alert can be generated from a spending quota, resources can still be created and consumed which could cause the spending quota to be exceeded.

Budgets in Azure Cost Management provide Azure customers subscriptions under many offer types with the ability to proactively manage cost and monitor Azure spend over time at a subscription level.

Budgets are a monitoring mechanism only, allowing users to create budgets with set thresholds and notification rules. When a budget threshold is exceeded a notification is triggered but resources continue to run. 

Navigate to Subscription >> Click on budget under Cost <management as shown below -

 

 Here you can configure your Budget and once done hit next in the bottom of this screen and in the next screen you can configure your alert as shown below -

Configure Alerts - Azure VM

Alert for the various state of Azure VM is something you will find people asking a lot & this blog to post we are focusing on the Azure Monitor or Azure Alert that you can configure for your Action group.

So, without making it any complex let’s make it absolutely simple and navigate to Azure VM >> Monitor >> Alerts (as shown below)

As you have seen the big red circle above, these are the options we need to play with. Lets hit the manage action groups and create the action group first.

Action Group = it’s a collection of notification preferences. Azure monitor and Service health alerts use action groups to notify users that an alert has been triggered.

In below snippet you can see what all options required to configure the Action group & you can also configure an action to notify a person by email or SMS, they receive a confirmation indication they have been added to the action group. 

We are taking the example of Email as notification preference and once I have added by mail , it took not more then 5 mins and received below email.

 

Now we have the action group in place lets create a rule for the alert , below Is the create alert rule plane with all the 4 circled options that we need to fill –

Resource = As shown in the below snippet, you can select the resource for which you want ton configure the alerts, here we are talking about the VM state hence we would select the Resource as the VM (ACI-VM)

Condition = It’s a condition or logic that we will define and once that condition matches alert would get triggered or notification would be sent. There are a lot of inbuilt conditions and we are choosing Deallocate Virtual Machine (Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines).

Action Group = We need to select the action group that we already discussed and created

Alert Details = Configure the name and description of your alert and Click on create rule , it would take approx. 5 mins and you are all set.

Now once condition matches as in my scenario when VM got shut down , I have got email as shown below -

Now you can navigate to Aure Monitor >> Alerts >> you can will dashboard and once you click on alerts, you will see all the alerts that fired -

There is one more option that makes it more interesting is Change state , once the support or action group take the action needed , he can navigate to that particular alert and change its state.