A year ago, I wrote a bit about Azure Arc and its use for non-Azure host management, and I also mentioned that the service was free at the time. And while it still is for the most part, update management for Arc-enabled servers is no longer free. Last year I didn’t speculate on how long the free lunch would last, but now that the free lunch is over, and the way I found out was through my own Azure cost management, I wanted to take a closer look at this feature in Azure.
Like all other cloud computing platforms, Azure doesn’t specifically limit your spending when you use a budgeting feature; instead, budgeting is mainly used to keep track of things and to set up alerts if - or should I say when - something takes an unexpected turn. This was the case recently when a development environment of mine sent me an email saying that my rather generous budget of $5 per month was 50% spent. While it’s obviously not the end of the world, it’s definitely a lot more than my average spending of $0.50 per month on this subscription, so I decided to take a look at the cost analysis in Azure Cost Management.
When I opened the page, I could immediately see a sharp increase in spending, and quite conveniently, I could see that the main culprit was Azure Update Manager. Now, I’ll admit that I’m not one to follow all the news and update emails that I subscribe to, so while this was definitely a problem of my own making, I was saved by having a budget set up to notify me of exactly this scenario.
I’m working on a more comprehensive article on how to actually set and manage the budgets both through the Portal and through CLI, because CLI is fun even if it’s pretty pointless for something like this, but this one will serve more as a lessons learned - or a “told you so”, depending on which side of the table you’re sitting on, I suppose, kind of message to subconsciously remind me to do this sort of alerting in the future.