The latest APIs let users query Azure usage details, as well as Marketplace charges, by any billing period. In combination with other tools, this gives organizations an extensive view into usage and expenditure on Azure.
Azure Consumption and Charge API Features
These APIs are still in development, but they already provide significant benefit to users. Here’s Microsoft’s full summary:
“Balance and Summary: The Balance and Summary API offers a monthly summary of information on balances, new purchases, Azure Marketplace service charges, adjustments, and overage charges. Usage Details: The Usage Detail API offers a daily breakdown of consumed quantities and estimated charges by an enrollment. The result also includes information on instances, meters, and departments. The API can be queried by billing period or by a specified start and end date. Marketplace Store Charge: The Marketplace Store Charge API returns the usage-based marketplace charges breakdown by day for the specified billing period or start and end dates. Price Sheet: The Price Sheet API provides the applicable rate for each meter for the given enrollment and billing period.
Billing Periods: The Billing Periods API returns a list of billing periods that have consumption data for the specified enrollment in reverse chronological order. Each period contains a property pointing to the API route for the four sets of data, BalanceSummary, UsageDetails, Marketplace Charges, and PriceSheet.”
This is just the first release, and Microsoft plans to add plenty more features to help you optimize costs. The next step is to bring the data to Azure Resource Manager as a “consistent channel agnostic API set”. In the meantime, you can test the initial offering and influence the development. You can find the full documentation on the Azure site.
