Cost Explorer
Ad-hoc analysis with flexible date ranges, subscription filtering, and cross-dimensional breakdowns.
Cost Explorer is the ad-hoc analysis view. Use it when the Dashboard's fixed 30-day / 12-month windows don't match the question you're trying to answer — for example, comparing this quarter to last, or zooming in on a specific week where something looked unusual.
Picking a date range
A row of date-range chips sits at the top of the page:
- Today
- Last 7 days
- This month (calendar month to date)
- Last 30 days (default)
- Last 90 days
- Last 12 months
- Custom — opens From/To date pickers, then click Apply to load
The selected range drives every tile and chart on the page.
Filtering by subscription
A subscription dropdown at the top left lets you scope the entire view to a single subscription, or leave it at All subscriptions for the full picture. This is useful when one subscription dominates your spend and masks activity elsewhere — switch to the smaller subscription to see its own trend without the bigger one skewing the axis.
Summary tiles
Four tiles reflect your chosen date range and subscription filter:
- Total spend — actual spend for the selected period.
- Daily average — total divided by the number of days in the range. Helpful for quickly comparing periods of different lengths.
- Top subscription — the subscription that contributed the most, with its total. Hidden when you've already filtered to a single subscription.
- Top resource type — the Azure resource type (App Service Plan, SQL Database, etc.) that contributed the most, with its total.
Daily spend chart
The main chart shows per-day spend as bars with a seven-day moving average as a line. This is the most useful view for spotting when something changed: a step up in the bars is a new workload coming online; a gap or dip is something being torn down; and a sustained climb in the moving average is usually a slow-growing resource (a database filling up, for example, or logs retaining more data).
Breakdowns
Three panels along the bottom break the selected period down by different dimensions:
- Top subscriptions by cost (donut)
- Top resource groups by cost (donut)
- Top resource types by cost (horizontal bar chart)
All segments are click-through and drill into the detail view for that subscription, resource group, or resource type — scoped to the date range you had set.
Common workflows
"What changed last week?" — Pick Last 7 days and look at the daily chart. A single bar much taller than the rest points to a specific day worth investigating; click the bar to drill into that day's breakdown.
"Which team's spend grew the most this month?" — Pick This month and compare the top resource groups donut. If resource groups map to teams, the answer is the biggest segment that wasn't there (or was much smaller) last month.
"Is our SQL spend trending up?" — Pick Last 90 days and look at the top resource types bar. Then switch the subscription filter between your environments (prod, staging, dev) to see where the growth is concentrated.