Monitoring resource consumption in Azure is about to become much easier for customers. Microsoft Corp. today open-sourced a reporting system it calls the Usage and Billing Portal that provides the ability to visually track all of an organization’s cloud expenses, even if they’re spread out over multiple accounts.

Administrators can implement the dashboard manually or use the ready-made PowerShell setup script that Microsoft has helpfully attached to the project’s deployment guide on GitHub. Once the Usage and Billing Portal is deployed, the user is greeted by a registration page where they’re able to link the system with their organization’s Azure subscriptions. The project takes advantage of the operational data feeds that Redmond rolled out for the platform a few months ago to pull detailed information about the activity in each account. For convenience’s sake, it provides the ability to customize what metrics are collected as well as the frequency in which they’re refreshed.

The rest is straightforward. Operational data pulled from Azure shows up in a graph that is generated automatically using Microsoft’s recently updated Power BI tool. Administrators can view how much each account is costing their organization, break down the cloud bill by resource or application and find unused instances that are creating unnecessary overhead. Redmond plans on adding an alerting mechanism in the future to let companies immediately detect when a deployment oversteps its allotted budget or displays some other abnormal behavior.

While designed for Azure, the Usage and Billing Portal could potentially also come handy for users of other public clouds like AWS. The fact that the project is open-source means nothing is stopping customers from porting it to rivaling platforms if they so desire, which is likely just what Microsoft had intended when it decided to make the underlying code freely available. The vendor might even perform the integration itself eventually, though cross-provider support wasn’t listed among the features on its immediate development roadmap. Either way, the new project should make Redmond more competitive against rivals such as Amazon Inc. and Alphabet Inc. that have to rely on partners to provide visual cost tracking functionality.

Image via Pixabay