Top 10 reasons you should not use Azure Cost Management

Managing cloud costs in Azure sounds simple until you scale. At first glance, Azure Cost Management gives you reports and charts, but once your environment grows to hundreds of subscriptions, thousands of resources, and multiple business units, the cracks start to show.

Here are the top 10 reasons why Azure Cost Management falls short, paired with real-world scenarios, and how Turbo360 solves them.

1.Limited Business Cost Visibility

Scenario:

Your finance team asks, “How much did the marketing analytics project cost us last quarter?” With Azure Cost Management, you only see a big lump sum at the subscription level.

Azure Problem: No clear visibility at business-unit or project level.

Turbo360 Fix:

Turbo360’s Cost Analyzer automatically maps Azure spend into hierarchies of business units, projects, and cost centers. You can even set dedicated access so each department only views their own costs.

2. Unreliable Reservation Utilization

Scenario:

Your IT team buys reserved instances for VMs, expecting big savings. Three months later, you realize half of them were applied to the wrong region, and some went completely unused. Azure Cost Management did not alert you.

Azure Problem: Limited visibility into reservation usage.

Turbo360 Fix:

Turbo360’s Reservations module gives a clear utilization report which reservations are idle, underutilized, or applied incorrectly. In this case, Turbo360 would have flagged the unused reservations early, letting your team re-scope them and avoid wasted spend. It also continuously tracks new reservation opportunities and suggests actionable savings insights so you never miss a chance to save.

3. Persistent Waste from Forgotten Resources

Scenario:

A developer spun up a test VM six months ago, forgot to shut it down, and it has been running ever since. Azure Cost Management shows the bill but does not tell you what is sitting idle.

Azure Problem: Hidden, persistent waste is hard to spot.

Turbo360 Fix:

Turbo360’s Other Recommendations detects this idle VM instantly. It alerts you via Teams, Slack, or email, so you can shut it down or reallocate it before the waste piles up into thousands of dollars. And it is not just VMs. Turbo360 covers more than 25 resource types including disks, VNets, public IPs, and more, giving you a complete view of potential waste.

4. Lack of Intelligent Right-Sizing

Scenario:

Your e-commerce app runs on D-series VMs. During peak season, you over-provisioned resources for safety. Now it is off-season, and you are still paying for extra compute you do not need. Azure sometimes gives false alerts where CPU is low but memory is high, and it still suggests downgrading, which is incorrect and risky.

Azure Problem: No intelligent resizing recommendations, and inaccurate alerts.

Turbo360 Fix:

Turbo360 analyzes historical usage and flags that those D-series VMs are consistently under 30 percent CPU. It recommends scaling down to a cheaper SKU, cutting costs without hurting performance. Turbo360 also lets you set custom thresholds for CPU, memory, or disk utilization, so you avoid false alerts and only get right-sizing insights that match your workload needs.

5. Finance Teams Lack Transparency

Scenario:

The CFO needs a breakdown of cloud spend for the board meeting. They ask, “How much did engineering spend versus customer support this month?” With Azure, IT scrambles to export CSVs and still cannot give a clean answer.

Azure Problem: Finance teams only see consolidated invoices.

Turbo360 Fix:

Turbo360 generates ready-to-use financial reports showing spend by service, project, department, or business unit. Finance leaders get clarity instantly, with full traceability back to usage data.

6. Weak and Delayed Anomaly Detection

Scenario:

On Friday evening, a misconfigured script starts duplicating storage blobs. You do not notice until Azure flags an anomaly a week later, since alerts only come after seven days, and by then, thousands of dollars are gone.

Azure Problem: Alerts are too late and too generic.

Turbo360 Fix:

Turbo360’s Budget Monitor with anomaly detection proactively flags unusual spend deviations. Instead of waiting a week, you can detect anomalies on the same day they occur, with alerts routed to Slack, Teams, or email.

7. Reactive Cost Management Approach

Scenario:

Your monthly Azure bill jumps by 20 percent. By the time you see the report, the overspend already happened.

Azure Problem: Reports are historical, not predictive.

Turbo360 Fix:

Turbo360 provides proactive forecasting and scheduled reports. If your bill is trending 20 percent higher mid-month, Turbo360 predicts it early, giving you time to stop runaway costs before the invoice arrives.

8. Inflexible Cost Allocation

Scenario:

Shared services like firewalls and databases are not tagged properly. Finance wants to distribute costs fairly, but Azure’s strict reliance on tags makes it impossible.

Azure Problem: Inflexible allocation without perfect tagging.

Turbo360 Fix:

Turbo360 applies allocation policies to fairly split shared or untagged costs. Even without perfect tags, you get accurate chargebacks, reducing disputes between teams.

9. High Barrier for Non-Technical Stakeholders

Scenario:

The operations head logs into Azure to check spend, but the portal feels too technical, filled with SKUs, meters, and subscription IDs. They give up and ask IT for help.

Azure Problem: Not user-friendly for finance or operations.

Turbo360 Fix:

Turbo360 provides business-friendly dashboards and drill-down reports. Non-technical teams see costs in simple terms, like “Support Department – $12,300 this month,” without needing IT translation.

10. Unrealized Cost Savings

Scenario:

You know there are savings opportunities in your Azure environment, but Azure does not surface them clearly. By the time consultants step in, you have overspent for months.

Azure Problem: Stops at visibility, lacks optimization guidance.

Turbo360 Fix:

Turbo360 continuously monitors and surfaces actionable cost optimization opportunities, from right-sizing workloads to deleting waste, from reservation utilization to savings plan recommendations. Turbo360’s Scheduler feature also lets you automate start and stop schedules for non-production resources, ensuring you are not paying for resources when no one is using them.

Final Thoughts

Azure Cost Management is fine if your cloud footprint is small. But for organizations managing more than 100 subscriptions and multiple teams, it quickly becomes a reporting tool instead of a cost control solution.

Turbo360 bridges this gap with

• Granular business visibility
• Proactive optimization and savings insights
• Continuous anomaly detection and forecasting
• Business-friendly dashboards for finance and operations
• Automation like scheduling to cut costs further

If you are tired of overspending, hidden waste, and week-late alerts, it is time to move beyond Azure Cost Management and embrace Turbo360, the FinOps-native solution for Azure.