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| 1 | +--- |
| 2 | +title: Explore Azure costs with Cost analysis | Microsoft Docs |
| 3 | +description: This article helps you use cost analysis to explore and analyze your Azure organizational costs. |
| 4 | +services: billing |
| 5 | +keywords: |
| 6 | +author: bandersmsft |
| 7 | +ms.author: banders |
| 8 | +ms.date: 08/16/2018 |
| 9 | +ms.topic: conceptual |
| 10 | +ms.service: billing |
| 11 | +manager: dougeby |
| 12 | +ms.custom: |
| 13 | +--- |
| 14 | +# Explore and analyze costs with Cost analysis |
| 15 | + |
| 16 | +Before you can properly control and optimize your Azure costs, you need to understand where costs originated within your organization. It's also useful to know how much money your services cost, and in support of what environments and systems. Visibility into the full spectrum of costs is critical to accurately understand organizational spending patterns, which can be used to enforce cost control mechanisms, like budgets. |
| 17 | + |
| 18 | +In this article, you use cost analysis to explore and analyze your organizational costs. You view aggregated costs by your organization to understand where costs are accrued and identify spending trends. You view accumulated costs over time to estimate monthly, quarterly, or even yearly cost trends against a budget. A budget helps to adhere to financial constraints or view daily or monthly costs to isolate spending irregularities. And, you can download the current report's data for further analysis or to use in an external system. |
| 19 | + |
| 20 | +## Requirements |
| 21 | + |
| 22 | +Cost analysis is available to all Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers. You must have read access to at least one of the following scopes to view cost data. |
| 23 | + |
| 24 | +- Azure EA billing account (enrollment) |
| 25 | +- Azure EA subscription |
| 26 | +- Azure EA subscription resource group |
| 27 | + |
| 28 | +## Review costs in cost analysis |
| 29 | + |
| 30 | +To review your costs with cost analysis, open the Azure portal then navigate to **Cost Management + Billing** > **Billing accounts** > select your EA billing account > under Cost Management, select **Cost analysis**. |
| 31 | + |
| 32 | +The initial cost analysis view includes the following areas: |
| 33 | + |
| 34 | +**Total** – Shows the total costs for the current month. |
| 35 | + |
| 36 | +**Budget** – Shows the planned spending limit for the selected scope, if available. |
| 37 | + |
| 38 | +**Accumulated cost** – Shows the total accrued daily spending, starting from the beginning of the month. If you have [created a budget](billing-cost-management-budget-scenario.md#create-the-azure-budget) for your billing account or subscription, you can quickly see your spending trend in relation to the budget. Hover over a date to the accumulated cost to that day. |
| 39 | + |
| 40 | +**Pivot (donut) charts** – Provide dynamic pivots. They break down the total cost by a common set of standard properties. The charts show the most to least cost accrued for the current month. You can change pivot charts at any time by selecting a different pivot. By default, costs are broken down by service (meter category), location (region), and child scope (for example, enrollment accounts under billing accounts, resource groups under subscriptions, and resources under resource groups). |
| 41 | + |
| 42 | + |
| 43 | + |
| 44 | + |
| 45 | + |
| 46 | +## Customizing cost views |
| 47 | + |
| 48 | +The default view provides quick answers to common questions like: |
| 49 | + |
| 50 | +- How much did I spend? |
| 51 | +- Will I stay within my budget? |
| 52 | + |
| 53 | +However, there are many cases where you need deeper analysis. Customization starts at the top of the page, with the date selection. |
| 54 | + |
| 55 | +By default, cost analysis shows data for the current month. Use the date selector to quickly switch to the last month, this month, this calendar quarter, this calendar year, or a custom date range of your choice. Selecting the last month is the quickest way to analyze your latest Azure invoice and easily reconcile charges. The current quarter and year options help track costs against longer-term budgets. Or, you can select a more fine-grained or broader date range, from a single day to the last seven days or anything as far back as a year before the current month. |
| 56 | + |
| 57 | + |
| 58 | + |
| 59 | +Also by default, cost analysis shows **accumulated** costs. Accumulated costs include all costs for each day in addition to the previous days, for a constantly growing view of your daily, accrued costs. This view is optimized to show how you are trending against a budget for the selected time range. |
| 60 | + |
| 61 | +There's also the **daily** view. It shows costs for each day and doesn't show a growth trend. The daily view is optimized to show irregularities as costs spike or dip from day to day. When you select a budget, the daily view also shows an estimate of what your daily budget might look like. If your daily costs are consistently above the estimated daily budget, then you can expect that you'll exceed your monthly budget. The estimated daily budget is simply a means to help you visualize your budget at a lower level. When you have fluctuations in daily costs, then the estimated daily budget comparison to your monthly budget is less accurate. |
| 62 | + |
| 63 | + |
| 64 | + |
| 65 | +You can **Group by** to select a group category to change data displayed in the top total area graph. Grouping lets you quickly see how your spending is categorized by resource type. Here's a view of Azure service costs for a last month view. |
| 66 | + |
| 67 | + |
| 68 | + |
| 69 | +Pivot charts are under the top Total view. Use them to see views for different grouping and filtering categories. When you select any group category, the full set of data for total view is at the bottom of the view. Here's an example for resource groups. |
| 70 | + |
| 71 | + |
| 72 | + |
| 73 | +### Download cost analysis data |
| 74 | + |
| 75 | +When you **Download** information from cost analysis, a CSV file is generated for all data currently shown in the Azure portal. If you've applied any filters or grouping, then they're included in the file. Some underlying data for the top Total chart that isn't actively displayed in the portal is also included in the CSV file. |
| 76 | + |
| 77 | +## Next steps |
| 78 | + |
| 79 | +View other [Azure billing and cost management documentation](billing-cost-management-budget-scenario.md). |
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