 If you've ever received a warning from a budget that you've set on an Azure subscription or a resource group, or you're just generally wondering how your subscription costs are growing in any given month, and what's making up that cost, I've got some great tips to share on how to use the cost analysis graph inside Azure Cost Management and Billing. Hi, I'm Sonia Kuff, a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, and I'm going to show you my favorite tip for using the cost analysis graph inside Azure Cost Management and Billing. To find out exactly what meters inside your Azure resources are ticking over the most and contributing the most to cost. Now, this graph looks very simple and deceptive when you first look at it, but there are some great tips to getting the most out of this data. By default, this graph is showing the accumulated cost of all of my resources in a particular subscription over time. I can change that to a daily view to see how much the resources have cost me per day, but the grouping is where we start to get some more details. We also have at the bottom some pre-made graphs of the services that are costing the most, the location, and in this case, the enrollment account for larger organizations that are using something called an Enterprise Agreement. If I take a look at all of these costs and group them by a resource group name, I can see which particular groups of resources are costing the most, with the remaining ones that are too small to fit on this graph grouped into an others group. Then by clicking on one of the color bands, the blue one for the resource group that is costing me the most this month, it pops that resource group name up into the filter bar. Now I can manually go and add filters or I can carry on clicking on the chart and choosing these different options to build my filtering. This is the accumulated cost for my resource group. Now let's group this by resource, and I can hover over the color bars to bring up the list. It's my virtual machine scale sets that are costing us the most. I'm interested in what's happening with one of my virtual machines though, so I'll click on the purple bar for the e-flow VM2, and I can see there's been a significant cost difference from the start of the month going into later on in the month. Now I'm going to group it by meter, and the accumulated graph is showing me a couple of different things here. I've got two different sizes for this virtual machine, a D14 series and a D2A series. And I'm also showing that the data transfer out, the cost of that has been pretty minimal. So how does this make sense? A virtual machine can't have two different sizes at the same time, but remember we're looking at the cumulative cost over time. So day one plus day two plus day three plus day four. And if I change to a daily view, now I can see the story that the virtual machine was the D2A size earlier on in the month, and then it got resized to the D14 size. So there was possibly an increase in demand on this server, which meant that we needed to increase the capability of the hardware that it was accessing. And there are a few other things that we can do with this chart, including changing the display of it, two different chart styles, or even bringing the information up as a table. So now I have a detailed list of the cost incurred by this virtual machine each day. Back on the main chart, I can also look at this graph in comparison to budgets that I've set. And it will give me an indication of the forecasted costs for this subscription for this month, based on what those usage patterns have been so far. For more information on Azure Cost Management and Billing, check out the links that I've placed in the description.