version: "1.0.0" name: azure-cost-management description: Azure cost optimization and financial governance. Use for Advisor recommendations, commitment discounts (reservations and savings plans), budgets, cost exports, anomaly alerts, credit and MACC tracking, orphaned resource detection, VM rightsizing, and retail price lookup. license: MIT compatibility: Requires Azure CLI authentication (az login) and appropriate RBAC permissions for Cost Management APIs. metadata: author: microsoft version: "1.1.0" allowed-tools: az pwsh curl

Azure Cost Management

Azure Cost Management and optimization skills. Provides recommendations, budget management, exports, alerts, and commitment tracking capabilities.

Domain Knowledge

Cost Optimization

Azure Advisor Recommendations

az advisor recommendation list --category Cost --output table

Suppression: Up to 90-day TTL, bulk suppression via management groups.

For detailed documentation: references/azure-advisor.md

Orphaned resources

Detect unused resources generating waste with zero workload value. Immediate savings, zero risk.

az graph query -q "resources | where type == 'microsoft.compute/disks' | where properties.diskState == 'Unattached' | project name, resourceGroup, sizeGb = properties.diskSizeGB"

Covers: unattached disks, unused NICs, orphaned public IPs, idle NAT gateways, orphaned snapshots, idle load balancers, empty availability sets, orphaned NSGs.

For detailed documentation: references/azure-orphaned-resources.md

VM rightsizing

Identify over-provisioned VMs using Advisor + Azure Monitor metrics, validate with retail pricing.

• Thresholds: CPU P95 < 20%, memory avg < 30%
• Safety checks: burst requirements (P99), instance size flexibility, Hybrid Benefit

For detailed documentation: references/azure-vm-rightsizing.md

Savings plans and reservations

Benefit Recommendations API for:

• Savings plan purchase recommendations (up to 65% savings)
• Reservation recommendations (up to 72% savings)
• Coverage analysis and utilization monitoring
• Decision framework: when to use which commitment type

For detailed documentation:

• references/azure-savings-plans.md — savings plan analysis and script
• references/azure-reservations.md — reserved instance analysis
• references/azure-commitment-discount-decision.md — decision framework

Azure Retail Prices

Public API for looking up Azure pricing by SKU, region, and tier. No authentication required.

https://prices.azure.com/api/retail/prices?$filter=armSkuName eq 'Standard_D4s_v5' and armRegionName eq 'eastus'

Use for: price comparisons, rightsizing savings validation, cross-region cost analysis.

For detailed documentation: references/azure-retail-prices.md

Budget & Alerts

Budgets

• Up to 5 notifications per budget
• Action Groups at Subscription/Resource Group scope only
• Threshold types: Actual, Forecasted

az consumption budget list --output table

For detailed documentation: references/azure-budgets.md

Anomaly Alerts

Enterprise-scale deployment with pagination for large environments.

For detailed documentation: references/azure-anomaly-alerts.md

Cost Exports

FOCUS format exports to storage accounts with backfill support.

For detailed documentation: references/azure-cost-exports.md

Commitment Tracking

Azure Credits (Prepayment)

Track EA/MCA credit balances, expiration dates, consumption history.

For detailed documentation: references/azure-credits.md

MACC (Azure Consumption Commitment)

Track MACC balance, decrements, milestone progress, eligible spend.

For detailed documentation: references/azure-macc.md

Reference documentation

• Optimization: references/azure-advisor.md, references/azure-savings-plans.md, references/azure-reservations.md
• Waste detection: references/azure-orphaned-resources.md
• Rightsizing: references/azure-vm-rightsizing.md, references/azure-retail-prices.md
• Decision framework: references/azure-commitment-discount-decision.md
• Budgets and alerts: references/azure-budgets.md, references/azure-anomaly-alerts.md, references/azure-cost-exports.md
• Commitments: references/azure-credits.md, references/azure-macc.md

Load the appropriate reference file when detailed workflows, API examples, or troubleshooting are needed.

Safety

Always confirm with the user before executing any delete, remove, or purge operation. This includes Remove-AzDisk, az network public-ip delete, az disk delete, and any bulk cleanup scripts. Show the list of resources to be deleted and wait for explicit approval before proceeding. Never infer consent from a general "clean up orphaned resources" request.

Best practices

Cost API queries

Use az rest with a JSON body rather than az costmanagement query — it is more reliable and supports the full query schema:

az rest --method post \
  --url "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/<SUB_ID>/providers/Microsoft.CostManagement/query?api-version=2023-11-01" \
  --body '@cost-query.json'

Free tier awareness

Many Azure services have generous free allowances that explain $0 cost lines. Do not flag these as anomalies. Examples:

• Container Apps: 180K vCPU-sec and 360K GB-sec free per month
• Azure Functions: 1M executions free per month
• Log Analytics: first 5 GB/month free per workspace

Azure Quick Review (azqr)

For broad orphaned resource scanning, Azure Quick Review (azqr) can scan entire subscriptions efficiently and identify orphaned resources, oversized SKUs, and missing tags in one pass. Complement the Resource Graph queries in references/azure-orphaned-resources.md with azqr for large environments.

Azure portal links

Include deep links to resources when presenting recommendations. Use this format (includes tenant context):

https://portal.azure.com/#@<TENANT_ID>/resource/subscriptions/<SUB_ID>/resourceGroups/<RG>/providers/<PROVIDER>/<TYPE>/<NAME>/overview

Data classification

When presenting cost data, label the source clearly so recommendations are auditable:

• ACTUAL DATA — Retrieved from Azure Cost Management API
• ACTUAL METRICS — Retrieved from Azure Monitor
• VALIDATED PRICING — Retrieved from official Azure pricing pages (prices.azure.com)
• ESTIMATED SAVINGS — Calculated from actual data and validated pricing

Never present estimates as actuals.

Common pitfalls

• Assuming costs: Always query actual data from the Cost Management API before making recommendations.
• Ignoring free tiers: Validate $0 cost lines against known free allowances before treating them as anomalies.
• Using `az costmanagement query`: Prefer az rest — the CLI command has known reliability issues with complex queries.
• Wrong date ranges: Use 30 days for cost analysis, 14 days for utilization metrics.
• Broken portal links: Always include tenant ID in portal URLs.
• Presenting estimates as actuals: Use the data classification labels above to be explicit about the source of every number.