Skills

Chapter 13 of 37

Azure Cost

Azure cost management: query costs, forecast spending, optimize to reduce waste.

1 minute · 60 words · 6 sections

Azure Cost Management Skill

Query historical costs, forecast future spending, optimize to reduce waste.

Routing

User Intent	Workflow
Understand current costs	Cost Query (opens in a new tab)
Reduce costs / find waste	Cost Optimization (opens in a new tab)
Project future costs	Cost Forecast (opens in a new tab)

Quick Reference

Property	Value
Query API	`POST {scope}/providers/Microsoft.CostManagement/query?api-version=2023-11-01`
Forecast API	`POST {scope}/providers/Microsoft.CostManagement/forecast?api-version=2023-11-01`
Required Role	Cost Management Reader + Monitoring Reader + Reader (on target scope)

Scope Patterns

Subscription: /subscriptions/<id>
Resource Group: /subscriptions/<id>/resourceGroups/<name>
Management Group: /providers/Microsoft.Management/managementGroups/<id>
Billing Account: /providers/Microsoft.Billing/billingAccounts/<id>

References

Install this repository

$ npx skills add microsoft/azure-skills

» /plugin marketplace add microsoft/azure-skills

Skills install per repository, not per chapter — the CLI has no documented per-skill form, so we do not print one.

About this skill

Trigger

Azure cost management: query costs, forecast spending, optimize to reduce waste. WHEN: "Azure costs", "Azure bill", "cost breakdown", "how much am I spending", "forecast spending", "optimize costs", "reduce spending", "orphaned resources", "rightsize VMs", "cost spike", "reduce storage costs", "AKS cost". DO NOT USE FOR: deploying resources, provisioning, diagnostics, or security audits.

The verbatim description from this skill’s front matter — the string an agent matches on to decide whether to load it.

Licence: MIT
Also published for: GitHub — collapsed into this chapter because the copies are the same skill.
Source: skills/azure-cost/SKILL.md

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How this issue was made

Source

github.com/microsoft/azure-skills, branch main, last pushed 10 August 2026.

Licence

MIT — the text of every chapter is reproduced unmodified, frontmatter included, under the upstream licence.

Discovery

37 chapters found by walking the repository tree for SKILL.md, not by matching a directory convention. 6 distinct layouts observed: skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/azure-app-onboard/*/SKILL.md, skills/azure-kubernetes/*/SKILL.md, skills/microsoft-foundry/*/SKILL.md, skills/microsoft-foundry/models/deploy-model/*/SKILL.md, skills/microsoft-foundry/models/*/SKILL.md.

Duplicates collapsed

37 mirror copies folded into their canonical chapter — republished for GitHub. Copies match on content hash and on position once a leading per-agent prefix is stripped, because the same skill is routinely shipped under a dozen agent directories with a dozen different hashes.

Issue colours

Resolved from a curated brand profile — hue 251°, chroma 0.167. Two accent tones are generated per issue and each is proven against its own ground before it ships: a single accent that passes AA on both light and dark paper is arithmetically impossible.

Heading repairs

1 repair applied to this chapter so the document has one h1 and no skipped levels:

Shifted “6 headings” from h1 to h2 so the chapter title is the only h1.

Spec compliance

6 editorial notes across 3 of 37 chapters. They are printed in the margin of each chapter rather than as errors here.

Deploy — 2 notes
Prepare — 2 notes
Scaffold — 2 notes

Images

Images inside a chapter come from the upstream repository. Where the author gave no alternative text we mark the image decorative rather than inventing a description — a plausible caption we made up is worse than none for the reader who depends on it.

Marketplace

A plugin manifest is published at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json by Microsoft, declaring 1 plugin. It is read for editorial metadata only — never as the skill index, which is always the repository tree.

Signal

Install counts come from skills.sh. They measure downloads, not quality, and an unranked repository is not an unread one.

Agent surfaces

The whole issue is available as one markdown document at /microsoft/azure-skills.md, and each chapter at its own .md URL.

Publication

Set by Skills Docs from the source repository. Body text is Literata at the reader’s chosen size and measure; code is Geist Mono. Nothing on this page was written by us except this paragraph.

Azure Cost Management Skill

Query historical costs, forecast future spending, optimize to reduce waste.

Routing

User Intent	Workflow
Understand current costs	Cost Query (opens in a new tab)
Reduce costs / find waste	Cost Optimization (opens in a new tab)
Project future costs	Cost Forecast (opens in a new tab)

Quick Reference

Property	Value
Query API	`POST {scope}/providers/Microsoft.CostManagement/query?api-version=2023-11-01`
Forecast API	`POST {scope}/providers/Microsoft.CostManagement/forecast?api-version=2023-11-01`
Required Role	Cost Management Reader + Monitoring Reader + Reader (on target scope)

Scope Patterns

Subscription: /subscriptions/<id>
Resource Group: /subscriptions/<id>/resourceGroups/<name>
Management Group: /providers/Microsoft.Management/managementGroups/<id>
Billing Account: /providers/Microsoft.Billing/billingAccounts/<id>

Azure Cost

Azure Cost Management Skill

Routing

Quick Reference

Scope Patterns

Service-Specific Optimization

References

About this skill

Trigger

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Azure Cost

Azure Cost Management Skill

Routing

Quick Reference

Scope Patterns

Service-Specific Optimization

References

Appendix 13.1–13.22

ReferencesMarkdown · 1 file

Also bundledMarkdown · 21 files

About this skill

Trigger

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Appendix 13.1–13.22

ReferencesMarkdown · 1 file

Also bundledMarkdown · 21 files