Daily Cost

The Daily Cost chart and tables help you understand the day-to-day differences in your costs. To see Cost Analytics for public cloud billing data, you must have billing retrieval turned on.

When unfiltered, the default Daily Cost chart shows a summary of your total costs for the current month, so you can easily see any spikes in your costs and investigate the cause of extra expenses. Each bar on this chart represents one day and each bar can be selected to view your daily cost breakdown in table format.

Accurate daily billing data takes a while for public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and Google) to accumulate and publish, so for public clouds, the most recent cost shown on this chart is for the day before yesterday. You'll still see a bar for yesterday's costs, but the amount will be zero. For private clouds, the most recent day shown is the previous day.

The horizontal dotted orange line indicates the average cost of all the days that are visible at the current zoom level. Click the legend of this chart to show or hide weekdays or weekends. Click the  Export button to download the Daily Cost in an XLS format.

Displayed date range

By default, the Daily Cost chart displays daily costs for the current month.

However, you can also display a specific start and end date for the Daily Cost chart, instead of using the default period of a month. If you use a specific start and end dates, the minimum period that you can select is 7 days.

You can also use the zoom or scroll arrows features to view your cost trends on bigger or smaller scales. The cost scale on the y-axis changes to accommodate bar or line height as you zoom and scroll.

Specify a date range

1. Select the calendar icon, then select a start date.
2. Select the right calendar icon, then select an end date.
3. Click the check mark icon to apply the new date range.

Zoom

You can use the  and  zoom icons to increase or decrease the display of the daily cost period to one of the following scales:

• one week
• one month
• three months
• six months
• one year
• two years

If you set a custom time range through the calendar, zooming will increase or decrease the displayed range to the next closest time scale based on your set end date. For example, for a range of January 1 to February 9 (40 days in total), if you zoom out once, a scale of three months is applied, and daily cost data for three months up to February 9 will display.

As you zoom out, at three months, the bars in the chart change to a line to allow you to more easily visualize trends over time.

Scroll

You can use the arrows at the sides of the chart to scroll through your data to get a better picture of your costs over time. Scrolling allows you to view consecutive time spans or see older costs. By default, the scrolling feature uses a default monthly time range. However, if you have set a custom date range and/or have used the zoom tools to increase or decrease time range, scrolling will use the time range that you have set.

View cost details

To view basic cost details for each day on the chart, hover over a bar.

• If you click an individual bar, a Daily Cost Breakdown table will show the costs for that day, broken down by Service Type.
• If you click an individual Service Type, a Daily Cost Details table will show all the costs for that day under the Service Type you selected.

These two tables show you the most expensive costs first and are sortable by any column on the table headers.

• To help you understand a spike or dip in costs, sort the Cost Delta columns to show the largest cost increases and decreases.
• Use the general Cost Analytics filters to view subsets of the total daily costs. For more information, see Filtering cost analytics information.
• If you do not see the costs you expect to see, or if no costs are visible, see Troubleshooting Cost Analytics.

Storage costs for Azure shared disks are allocated based on VM ownership. If multiple VMs referencing a shared disk are assigned to different organizations, or to primary owners from different organizations, the cost for the shared disk is assigned to the organization that comes first alphabetically. If a VM that references a shared disk has multiple primary owners, the username that comes first alphabetically is considered the sole primary owner for determining cost allocation.