Saving Cloud Dollars: Consumption usage details in Azure

The blog post by Lawrence Wilson explains how to use Octopus to monitor and manage Azure resource costs by setting up notifications for cost spikes that exceed a predefined limit. Utilizing Octopus's ability to authenticate with various cloud platforms, users can deploy scripts to retrieve consumption usage details from Azure and calculate the costs associated with each resource group. A fictional company, OctoFX, is used as a scenario to illustrate the process of tagging resource groups with a NotifyCostLimit, allowing Octopus to send Slack notifications if costs surpass this limit. The post guides users through setting up an Azure Service Principal and Slack account for integration, creating a project in Octopus to automate this cost monitoring, and scheduling the deployment to run on a recurring basis. Key limitations include the exclusion of Service Manager resources and potential delays in data availability, while the script focuses on Microsoft Azure but can be adapted for AWS.