Skills

Skill 3 of 47

Cost Governance

Govern Azure costs with budgets, alerts, tags, and policy restrictions.

1 minute · 136 words · 5 sections

Install

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

$ 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.

Quick Reference

Intent	Workflow	Primary tools
Check budget status	Budget health (opens in a new tab)	`list_budgets`, `forecast_costs`, `query_costs`, `list_alerts`
Configure a budget	Budget setup (opens in a new tab)	Cost tools, `create_budget`
Review guardrails	Guardrails (opens in a new tab)	Resource Graph, `list_budgets`

When to Use This Skill

Use for budgets, alerts, tags, and policy.

MCP Tools

Use cost tools for budgets; Resource Graph for guardrails. Writes need confirmed scope, amount, thresholds, and recipients. Fallback: API mappings (opens in a new tab).

Workflow

Confirm scope and load the matching workflow.
Never transform MCP results in a shell or interpreter; request tool-side filtering or bounded follow-up queries.
Distinguish access failures from empty results.
Report gaps without implying budgets cap spend.

Error Handling

Error	Action
Access denied	Name missing permission.
No budget or forecast	Report unavailable data, not zero.
Multiple currencies	Never sum or compare across currencies.
Write conflict	Preserve the budget.
Server error	Retry once; then stop with the trace ID.

About this skill

Trigger

Govern Azure costs with budgets, alerts, tags, and policy restrictions. WHEN: "Azure budget health", "configured budget overrun", "list Azure budgets", "create Azure budget", "budget alerts", "budget coverage", "missing CostCenter tags", "allowed VM SKUs", "allowed Azure regions", "would this SKU be denied", "cost guardrails". DO NOT USE FOR: planning-target forecasts, bill investigations, pricing, rightsizing, or commitments.

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-governance/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:

Removed “Cost Governance”, a leading h1 that duplicated the skill title.

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.

Quick Reference

Intent	Workflow	Primary tools
Check budget status	Budget health (opens in a new tab)	`list_budgets`, `forecast_costs`, `query_costs`, `list_alerts`
Configure a budget	Budget setup (opens in a new tab)	Cost tools, `create_budget`
Review guardrails	Guardrails (opens in a new tab)	Resource Graph, `list_budgets`

Confirm scope and load the matching workflow.
Never transform MCP results in a shell or interpreter; request tool-side filtering or bounded follow-up queries.
Distinguish access failures from empty results.
Report gaps without implying budgets cap spend.

Error Handling

Error	Action
Access denied	Name missing permission.
No budget or forecast	Report unavailable data, not zero.
Multiple currencies	Never sum or compare across currencies.
Write conflict	Preserve the budget.
Server error	Retry once; then stop with the trace ID.

Cost Governance

Quick Reference

When to Use This Skill

MCP Tools

Workflow

Error Handling

About this skill

Trigger

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Cost Governance

Quick Reference

When to Use This Skill

MCP Tools

Workflow

Error Handling

Appendix 3.1–3.4

ReferencesMarkdown · 4 files

About this skill

Trigger

Colophon

Appendix 3.1–3.4

ReferencesMarkdown · 4 files