Britt Henderson presents the July & August 2025 updates for Microsoft Cost Management, covering new features, automation improvements, and partner-focused enhancements to help Azure users monitor, control, and optimize their cloud expenditures.

Microsoft Cost Management Updates—July & August 2025

Microsoft Cost Management helps organizations of all sizes monitor, analyze, and optimize their Azure spending, reducing the risk of surprise cloud bills and supporting better financial planning.

Key July & August 2025 Highlights

Service Principal Support for Partner Admin Reader Role: Partners can now assign the Partner Admin Reader role to service principals, enabling secure, programmatic access to cost data for customers managed under Enterprise Agreements. This eliminates the need for manual exports or shared credentials and leverages Azure Active Directory (Microsoft Entra ID) for secure access.
- Automate cost data retrieval for partner billing and dashboards
- Control billing scope access with Azure RBAC
- Enable near real-time monitoring across customers
- Learn more about role assignment
Azure Pricing Calculator: Tip of the Month: Large estimates are more manageable by collapsing detailed configurations, allowing users to focus on summary lines for easier comparison and sharing. This functionality streamlines estimating complex Azure workloads.
New Cost-Saving Features:
- Azure Firewall Ingestion-Time Transformation: Transform or filter firewall logs before ingestion for reduced Log Analytics storage costs while retaining security insights.
- Azure Storage Mover for S3-to-Azure Blob Migration: Securely migrate data from Amazon S3 to Azure Blob at no additional cost, simplifying multi-cloud and migration scenarios.
Learning Resources:
Documentation Updates:
- Partial payment options, India-specific payment methods, enhanced reservation management, and new guidance for chargeback, reservation permissions, automation, and consumption commitment resources.
- Cost Management Docs

Additional Updates and Community Engagement

General availability and previews of cost optimization features
Community forums, feedback channels, and GitHub contributions welcomed
Regular monthly update cadence encourages ongoing learning and participation from Azure users

Get Involved

Submit feedback and vote on new features: Cost Management forum
Subscribe to the Microsoft Cost Management YouTube channel
Track changes and contribute to documentation: Azure Docs repo

Stay tuned for future updates, and keep engaging to shape the direction of Microsoft Cost Management.

This post appeared first on “The Azure Blog”. Read the entire article here