Cost Explorer

Filters

Two filter dropdowns sit at the top left of the page:

• Tenant — scope the view to a single Azure tenant, or leave at All tenants. The Subscription dropdown filters to subscriptions belonging to the chosen tenant.
• Subscription — scope to a single subscription, or leave at All subscriptions for the full picture. Useful when one subscription dominates your spend and masks activity elsewhere — switch to the smaller subscription to see its own trend without the bigger one skewing the axis.

Picking a period

The period selector at the top right of the page drives every tile and chart on the page. Options are grouped:

• Calendar — This week, This month, This quarter, This year, Last month, Last quarter, Last 3 / 6 / 12 months.
• Relative — Last 7 days, Last 30 days (default), Last 90 days.
• Custom date range — opens From/To date pickers.

Summary tiles

Four tiles reflect your chosen period and tenant / subscription filters:

• Total spend — actual spend for the selected period, with the date range shown underneath.
• Daily average — total divided by the number of days in the range. Helpful for quickly comparing periods of different lengths.
• Top subscription — the subscription that contributed the most, with its total. Hidden when you've already filtered to a single subscription.
• Top resource type — the Azure resource type (App Service Plan, SQL Database, etc.) that contributed the most, with its total.

Spend over period chart

The main chart plots spend across the selected period, with three controls in its top right:

• Group — break the bars down by a dimension. Options: None (default), Tenant, Subscription, Resource Group, Resource Type, Cost Centre. With a group selected, each day becomes a stack coloured by the chosen dimension and a legend appears below the chart.
• Daily / Accumulated — toggle between per-day spend and a running total that climbs across the period.
• Chart type — Line, Area, Stacked Column (default), or Grouped Column.

The chart title reflects the active filters — e.g. Daily spend — all tenants, Daily spend — Nexora Prod, or Cumulative spend in Accumulated mode. With grouping off, a seven-day moving average overlays the bars; with grouping on, the moving average is hidden because it doesn't apply per-group.

This is the most useful view for spotting when something changed: a step up in the bars is a new workload coming online; a gap or dip is something being torn down; and a sustained climb in the moving average is usually a slow-growing resource (a database filling up, for example, or logs retaining more data). Switching to Group: Cost Centre turns the same chart into a chargeback view, instantly showing which cost centre is driving each day's total.

Breakdowns

Three panels along the bottom break the selected period down by different dimensions:

• Top subscriptions by cost (donut)
• Top resource groups by cost (donut)
• Top resource types by cost (horizontal bar chart)

All segments are click-through and drill into the detail view for that subscription, resource group, or resource type — scoped to the period you had set.

Common workflows

"What changed last week?" — Pick Last 7 days and look at the daily chart. A single bar much taller than the rest points to a specific day worth investigating; click the bar to drill into that day's breakdown.

"Which team's spend grew the most this month?" — Pick This month, set Group: Cost Centre (or Resource Group if your teams map to RGs), and switch the chart type to Stacked Column. The team driving the biggest stack is the one to talk to.

"Is our SQL spend trending up?" — Pick Last 90 days, set Group: Resource Type, and the SQL Database stack tells you the trajectory at a glance. Switch the Tenant or Subscription filter to see where the growth is concentrated.

"How is total spend pacing through the month?" — Pick This month and switch to Accumulated. The cumulative line shows whether you're tracking ahead of, behind, or on the same trajectory as previous months.