Skills

Skill 1 of 47

Cost Analysis

Analyze actual Azure spend, bill changes, and AKS or AI costs.

1 minute · 144 words · 6 sections

Install

$ npx skills add microsoft/azure-skills --skill cost-analysis

$ npx skills add microsoft/azure-skills

» /plugin marketplace add microsoft/azure-skills

The first command installs just this skill, by the name in its SKILL.md; the second installs the whole repository.

Azure Cost Analysis

Quick Reference

Intent	Workflow	Primary tools
Query historical spend	Cost query (opens in a new tab)	`query_costs`
Explain a spike	Cost investigation (opens in a new tab)	`query_costs`, Resource Graph
Analyze AKS spend	AKS cost analysis (opens in a new tab)	`query_aks_costs`, Resource Graph
Analyze AI service spend	AI cost analysis (opens in a new tab)	`query_costs`

When to Use This Skill

Use for spend, anomalies, and AKS or AI allocation.

MCP Tools

Use cost tools and Resource Graph first. If an operation is unavailable, follow fallback and safety (opens in a new tab).

Workflow

Confirm scope, period, currency, and breakdown.
Load only the matching workflow above.
Never transform MCP results in a shell or interpreter; request tool-side totals, grouping, sorting, or bounded follow-up queries.
Respect row limits and label incomplete data.
Separate measured cost from inferred causes and recommendations.

Error Handling

Error	Action
Access denied	Name the required scope and role.
Empty result	Distinguish no data from unavailable data.
Multiple currencies	Report each currency separately.
Server error	Retry once; then stop with the trace ID.

About this skill

Trigger

Analyze actual Azure spend, bill changes, and AKS or AI costs. WHEN: "Azure cost breakdown", "most expensive resources", "why did my bill increase", "cost spike", "unexpected charge", "Cosmos DB charges", "Foundry model costs", "AKS cluster cost", "namespace cost", "enable AKS cost analysis", "idle AKS capacity". DO NOT USE FOR: forecasts, pricing estimates, rightsizing, commitments, or budgets.

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

Licence: MIT
Source: .github/plugins/azure-cost/skills/cost-analysis/SKILL.md

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How this issue was made

Source

github.com/microsoft/azure-skills, branch main, last pushed 23 September 2026.

Licence

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

Discovery

47 skills found by walking the repository tree for SKILL.md, not by matching a directory convention. 10 distinct layouts observed: .github/plugins/azure-cost/skills/*/SKILL.md, .github/plugins/azure-kusto-graph-skills/skills/*/SKILL.md, .github/plugins/azure-local-skills/skills/*/SKILL.md, .github/plugins/foundry-iq-skills/skills/*/SKILL.md, 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 skill — 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 skill so the document has one h1 and no skipped levels:

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

Spec compliance

6 editorial notes across 3 of 47 skills. They are printed in the margin of each skill rather than as errors here.

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

Images

Images inside a skill 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 5 plugins. 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 skill 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 Analysis

Quick Reference

Intent	Workflow	Primary tools
Query historical spend	Cost query (opens in a new tab)	`query_costs`
Explain a spike	Cost investigation (opens in a new tab)	`query_costs`, Resource Graph
Analyze AKS spend	AKS cost analysis (opens in a new tab)	`query_aks_costs`, Resource Graph
Analyze AI service spend	AI cost analysis (opens in a new tab)	`query_costs`

Confirm scope, period, currency, and breakdown.
Load only the matching workflow above.
Never transform MCP results in a shell or interpreter; request tool-side totals, grouping, sorting, or bounded follow-up queries.
Respect row limits and label incomplete data.
Separate measured cost from inferred causes and recommendations.

Error Handling

Error	Action
Access denied	Name the required scope and role.
Empty result	Distinguish no data from unavailable data.
Multiple currencies	Report each currency separately.
Server error	Retry once; then stop with the trace ID.

Cost Analysis

Azure Cost Analysis

Quick Reference

When to Use This Skill

MCP Tools

Workflow

Error Handling

About this skill

Trigger

Colophon

Cost Analysis

Azure Cost Analysis

Quick Reference

When to Use This Skill

MCP Tools

Workflow

Error Handling

Appendix 1.1–1.12

ReferencesMarkdown · 12 files

About this skill

Trigger

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Appendix 1.1–1.12

ReferencesMarkdown · 12 files