Budgets

Overview

The Budgets page (from the left navigation) is the hub for everything budget-related. It shows every budget configured for your organisation along with three summary cards at the top:

• Over Budget — budgets whose spend for the current period is at or above 100% of the limit. The tile shows the total amount over, across all affected budgets.
• Near Limit — budgets at 80% to 99% utilisation. A useful early warning.
• On Track — budgets under 80% utilisation.

The list below can be filtered by Tenant, Scope (Tenant, Subscription, Resource Group, or Tag Collection) and Period (Monthly, Quarterly, Annual).

Budget scopes

Every budget is attached to one of four scopes. Choose the one that matches the thing you're actually trying to control:

• Subscription — caps spend across one or more Azure subscriptions inside a single tenant. The most common scope. Multi-select means you can roll several subscriptions into one cap when they belong to the same workload.
• Resource Group — caps spend across one or more resource groups inside a single tenant. The selected resource groups can come from different subscriptions within that tenant. Useful for project-based budgeting where one project spans more than one subscription.
• Tag Collection — caps total spend across every resource that carries a specific tag, anywhere in the organisation. The collection ignores tenant, subscription, and resource-group boundaries — it follows the tag. See Tag Collection budgets.
• Tenant — caps total spend for an entire tenant. Tenant budgets are configured on the tenant's own settings page, not from the Budgets page — see Tenant budgets.

Creating a budget

From the Budgets page, click New Budget. The dialog adapts to the scope you choose:

Subscription scope

1. Pick Subscription as the scope.
2. Select a Tenant. The list of subscriptions below filters to that tenant.
3. Tick one or more subscriptions to include. Spend across all ticked subscriptions is summed for this single budget.
4. Set the period, amount, and alert thresholds (covered below).

Resource Group scope

1. Pick Resource Group as the scope.
2. Select a Tenant.
3. Use the Subscription → Resource Group pickers and click Add to add a resource group to the budget. Each addition appears as a chip. Repeat to add more — the resource groups can come from different subscriptions within the tenant. Click the × on a chip to remove it.
4. Set the period, amount, and alert thresholds.

Tag Collection scope

1. Pick Tag Collection as the scope. (This option only appears if you have permission to manage tag-collection budgets — see Permissions.)
2. Choose a Tag Key. The dropdown is populated from tag keys actually present on resources in your organisation, so you'll only see keys that will resolve to something.
3. Optionally choose a Tag Value. Leave it blank to match any value for the chosen key, which is occasionally useful (e.g. budget on every resource that has been touched by tagging at all). The matching value list comes from the values seen in the wild for that key.
4. Set the period, amount, and alert thresholds.

Common fields

• Name — optional. If omitted, the row label is derived from the target (e.g. the subscription name, the first resource group, or the key = value pair).
• Period — Monthly, Quarterly, or Annual. See Periods.
• Budget Amount — the cap, in your organisation's default currency.
• Alert thresholds — checkboxes at 50%, 75%, 90%, and 100%. See Alert thresholds.

The dialog no longer takes recipient emails — those come from the central Alerting page. See Notifications.

Tag Collection budgets

Tag Collection is the right choice when the thing you want to budget for doesn't line up neatly with the Azure hierarchy. The motivating example is a departmental budget: a department running several logical products across a handful of subscriptions (and possibly tenants) wants to see total spend tracked in one place. Tag every resource owned by that department with — for example — department=marketing, then create a Tag Collection budget on that key/value pair and the right number rolls up automatically.

A Tag Collection budget is fundamentally cross-tenant: by definition it can pull spend from any tenant attached to the organisation. Because of that, Cirrova requires a stronger permission for managing one (see Permissions).

On the Budgets list, Tag Collection budgets show a yellow Tag Collection badge, the matched key = value pair (or key (any value)) as the target, and an Organisation-wide subtitle to make the cross-tenant nature obvious at a glance.

Tenant budgets

A tenant budget caps total spend across every subscription in the tenant. It's configured from the tenant's own settings page, not from the central Budgets page. Go to Organisation Settings → Tenants, click the tenant name to open its settings, switch to the Cost tracking tab, then find the Budget card and click Add budget (or Edit if one already exists).

A tenant can have one budget at a time — there's a single Edit panel rather than the multi-row table used on the central page. Edits use the same period/amount/thresholds fields as elsewhere.

Tenant budgets still appear on the central Budgets page (with a Tenant badge) and are filterable by Scope=Tenant. They're managed from the tenant settings page only.

Periods

The period controls how the window rolls over.

• Monthly — the current period runs from the 1st of the calendar month to the last day of the month. It resets automatically.
• Quarterly — the period aligns to calendar quarters (Jan–Mar, Apr–Jun, Jul–Sep, Oct–Dec).
• Annual — the period runs for the calendar year.

Each row on the Budgets table shows the current period's start and end dates (e.g. 2026‑04‑01 – 2026‑04‑30) alongside spend to date.

Tracking utilisation

For each budget, the list shows:

• Budget — the name (or derived label) and target. Multi-target budgets show the first item plus a +N more hint.
• Scope — a colour-coded badge: Tenant (grey), Subscription (blue), Resource Group (cyan), Tag Collection (yellow).
• Limit — the amount you set when creating the budget.
• Spend — total actual spend for the current period.
• Utilisation — a progress bar and percentage, colour-coded:
  • Blue — under 80% (on track).
  • Orange — 80% to 99% (near limit).
  • Red — 100% or more (over budget).
• Current Period — the date range that spend is being summed over.

The Dashboard also surfaces a Budgets exceeded tile counting budgets at or over 100% utilisation, regardless of scope.

Alert thresholds

Thresholds are checkpoints: as soon as the current period's spend crosses one, Cirrova raises a Budget threshold crossed event for the budget. Available thresholds are 50%, 75%, 90%, and 100% of the budget amount. Tick as many as you want; untick them all to disable threshold events entirely and use the Budgets page as a passive tracker only.

Each threshold fires once per period. Crossing 75% won't re-alert if spend dips back under 75% and then over again inside the same month (or quarter, or year). When the period rolls over, all thresholds reset.

Notifications

Crossing a threshold raises a Budget threshold crossed event. Whether (and where) anyone hears about it is decided by the rules on the central Alerting page — go to Organisation Settings → Alerting, switch to the Rules tab, and add a rule for event type Budget threshold crossed. Pick the channels (email, Microsoft Teams, Slack, or a custom webhook) the rule should deliver to.

Scope a rule to specific budgets if you want different audiences for different budgets — finance hears about the production tenant budget; the platform team hears about every subscription budget; everyone hears when a tag-collection budget breaches.

Editing and deleting

Click the ⋮ menu on any row of the Budgets page to Edit or Delete a Subscription, Resource Group, or Tag Collection budget. Tenant budgets are edited from the tenant settings page (see Tenant budgets).

Editing lets you change the name, period, amount, and thresholds. The scope and target are fixed once the budget is created — you can't switch a Subscription budget to a different subscription, or a Tag Collection budget to a different tag. To change the target, delete the budget and create a new one.

Deletion is immediate and removes the budget along with its alert history. Past spend data is not affected — budgets don't own spend, they just measure it.

Permissions

Who can manage a budget depends on its scope.

• Subscription, Resource Group, Tenant — manageable by an organisation owner, or by a tenant admin on the budget's tenant.
• Tag Collection — manageable only by an organisation owner, or by someone with tenant admin rights on every tenant attached to the organisation. A tag-collection budget can pull spend from any tenant, including ones where the tag isn't currently used; resources can be re-tagged at any time and a previously-empty tenant can begin contributing spend retroactively, so the permission has to cover the whole organisation.

Users without permission don't see the New Budget button, and the Tag Collection scope option is hidden in the create dialog for users who don't qualify on that stricter rule. Edit and delete actions are filtered the same way.