New Azure features improve cost and governance capabilities

For organizations that depend on Azure, keeping track of costs, monitoring resource usage, and auditing deployed applications are critical for proper governance. The risks of poor governance are overspending, unmanageable resource sprawl, and, in the worst case, security vulnerabilities that you don't know exist.

SquaredUp provides a complete solution for monitoring and reporting on your Azure environment, so it's no surprise that it's one of our most popular integrations.

The latest improvements make it easier than ever to monitor and visualize costs, identify orphaned or wasteful resources, and report on your Entra applications. Let's take a look at what's new.

1. Simplified Azure cost reporting

Let's start with the big one – visualizing Azure costs. Unlike other solutions such as Power BI, SquaredUp integrates directly with the Azure Cost APIs – which means that, right out of the box, you get up-to-date cost information without the need to set up and maintain additional databases and data exports.

This has been a massive hit with customers, with one big downside: the Azure Cost API is notoriously strict with rate limits. This meant that cost dashboards could regularly hit problems when pulling the data and the user would patiently need to wait and retry until Azure allowed further API requests. It also meant that dashboard authors had to be careful not to scope the data too widely for fear of hitting the API rate limits.

We've added some magic to our Azure integration to do the hard work for you – SquaredUp will now intelligently make requests depending on the Azure API rate limits, automatically retrying until the data is complete. It also caches the data for the whole day and refreshes when new cost data is available (midnight UTC).

The result is simple and reliable Azure cost reporting.

2. Azure Reservation cost reporting

If you reduce your Azure costs using Reserved Instances, we now provide visibility of these via two new data streams for Azure Reserved Instance cost and the transaction history for reservations.

3. New data streams for Entra app registrations

Next up – better visibility of Entra app credentials. We’ve added two new data streams to track the health of Azure Entra apps based on the credentials expiry date of the secrets. Very useful to make sure you take action before any operations that use these app registrations get affected. And, of course, you can set up alerts notifying you about this in advance.

4. Relationships between Azure databases and host servers

Understanding the dependencies between resources is critical context for many operations – from cost reporting to root cause analysis. Using the the SquaredUp knowledge graph, you can now drill into an Azure database, see which SQL server hosts this instance in the map, along with any other relationships. You can drill into the SQL server to reveal other databases hosted on this SQL server as well.

5. Identify unattached disks

Orphaned Azure disks are an important resource to keep track of as they not only clutter the UI but also incur costs. Using the knowledge graph, you can now identify which disks are attached to which virtual machines as well as the ones that are not attached to anything.

6. Easier Azure Monitor metric configuration

We've made dashboarding your Azure Monitor metrics easier by adding metadata – such as the description of the metric – to the metric chooser, making it easier to find the right metric and understand how to use it.

7. 'Drill out' to the Azure console

SquaredUp is designed to be a single pane of glass for day-to-day visibility, but you may still need to perform actions or drop down to a lower level of data in the Azure portal. We now make it easy to 'drill out' directly to the corresponding resource in the Azure portal from any object drill-down in SquaredUp. This can be done using the View in Azure portal button.

All of these improvements are available to customers today. If you're new to SquaredUp then all of these features plus many more are available in the Free Plan. Check out the Azure plugin overview for more details.

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