First lesson in Domain 3 — a different kind of topic than compute/networking/storage. This is less "what is the service" and more "how do you estimate, watch, and control what it costs," which the exam likes to test with scenario questions about which tool fits which moment.
You're about to lift-and-shift three on-premises servers to Azure and want to know if it'll actually save money. Separately, once they're running in Azure, you want an early warning if a team's spend creeps past a threshold this month. Are those the same tool's job, or two different tools?
| Factor | Means |
|---|---|
| Resource type | Cost is specific to the resource and how it's configured — a bigger VM size or a premium storage tier costs more than the default |
| Consumption | Pay-as-you-go (full price, no commitment) vs. reservations (discount for a 1- or 3-year commitment) vs. Spot pricing (deep discount on spare capacity, can be evicted anytime) |
| Maintenance | A self-managed VM running SQL Server costs differently than Azure SQL Database (PaaS) doing the same job, because who maintains it shifts |
| Geography | Prices vary by region (power, labor, local costs); moving data out of a region or to the internet costs bandwidth — inbound data is free |
| Subscription type | Some subscription types (free trial, dev/test) include credits or reduced rates not available on pay-as-you-go |
| Azure Marketplace | Third-party products/services bought through the Marketplace add their own cost on top of the Azure resources they run on |
Pricing calculator — estimate the cost of a new Azure deployment you're planning, from scratch: pick services, sizes, regions, get a number.
TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) calculator — compare what your existing on-premises infrastructure costs today against running that same workload in Azure. You feed it your current servers, storage, and staff costs; it outputs the Azure-side comparison.
Anchor: Pricing calculator looks forward from nothing. TCO calculator looks sideways from what you already have.
Once resources are running, Microsoft Cost Management is the ongoing tool — not a one-time estimate, but continuous tracking:
| Capability | Does |
|---|---|
| Cost analysis | View current spend broken down by service, resource group, or tag; forecast where you're headed this billing period |
| Budgets | Set a spending threshold and get alerted (or trigger an action) when actual or forecasted cost crosses it |
| Recommendations | Surfaces cost-optimization suggestions (e.g. resize or shut down an underused VM) — the cost-focused counterpart to Azure Advisor |
Tags are name/value pairs you attach to resources, resource groups, or subscriptions — metadata that doesn't change how anything runs, but lets you group and report on resources in ways the resource group hierarchy alone can't. A resource belongs to exactly one resource group, but it can carry many tags (e.g. environment: production, costCenter: marketing), so you can slice a Cost Management report by "everything tagged marketing" even when those resources are scattered across different resource groups.
Calibration answer: two different tools. Estimating savings on a lift-and-shift of existing servers is the TCO calculator's job (comparing on-prem cost to Azure cost). Watching ongoing spend and getting an early warning is Cost Management budgets — a running tool, not a one-time estimate.