Hey everyone! 👋 Has anyone else in the FinOps trenches noticed that VMware Aria Cost (formerly CloudHealth) seems to be struggling with Azure Reservations and Savings Plans lately? I've been deep in a multi-cloud cost allocation project and hit a snag that's throwing off our showback reports.
Our setup pulls data from AWS, Azure, and GCP into Aria Cost for a unified view. While the AWS Reserved Instance coverage and Savings Plan tracking works pretty well, the Azure commitment handling feels... inconsistent. Specifically, I'm seeing cases where:
* **Amortized costs aren't aligning** with the commitment utilization shown in the Azure portal.
* **Recommendations for new reservations** seem to ignore existing commitments in other subscriptions under the same billing account.
* The "Unutilized Commitment" reports sometimes show **phantom unused amounts** even when our VM families are fully covered.
I've been on a call with their support and my own Azure EA admin, and we're going in circles. The support team pointed to the Azure Consumption API (which, as many of you know, can be a beast of its own). I built a custom connector last year to pull raw data, and the discrepancies are real.
Here's a snippet of the kind of API call I'm making to cross-check, focusing on the `amortizedCost` breakdown:
```json
// Sample query filter for Azure Cost Management API
{
"type": "AmortizedCost",
"dataSet": {
"granularity": "Daily",
"aggregation": {
"totalCost": {"name": "PreTaxCost", "function": "Sum"}
},
"grouping": [
{"type": "Dimension", "name": "ResourceType"},
{"type": "Dimension", "name": "ChargeType"}
]
},
"timeframe": "ThisMonth"
}
```
My current workaround involves a nightly Make scenario that:
1. Fetches commitment data directly from Azure.
2. Pulls unblended costs from Aria Cost.
3. Does a reconciliation and dumps the delta into a Snowflake table.
4. Sends a Slack alert if the variance is >5%.
It's messy, and I'd rather not maintain this glue code. 😅
**Questions for the community:**
* Are you seeing similar gaps, or is it just our configuration?
* Has anyone found a reliable mapping or setting within Aria Cost to better align Azure commitment tracking?
* If you've moved to another tool (like Flexera One, CloudAbility, or native Azure Cost Management + Tags), how was the migration for Azure commitment visibility?
Would love to compare notes and maybe build a better playbook. The goal is accurate chargeback, and right now the numbers are just soft enough to cause friction with our dev teams.
-- Ian
Integration Ian
That line about phantom unused amounts is spot on. We see it too, usually tied to how Aria handles the Azure EA billing scope. Their system sometimes applies a commitment at one scope (like an enrollment) but the cost allocation engine looks at a different scope (like a subscription), which creates the mismatch in the reports.
It gets especially messy with shared savings plans across subscriptions. Our workaround has been to export the raw commitment data from Azure Cost Management into a separate sheet, then manually reconcile the coverage percentages against what Aria shows. It's not elegant, but it's stopped the showback arguments for now.
Have you checked if your Azure connector is pulling from the Billing Profile scope or the Enrollment scope? That was a key switch for us.
We've seen the same Azure commitment mismatches. Aria's core problem is treating each cloud's billing API as equivalent, but they're not. The Azure Consumption API has fundamental scoping and latency issues Aria can't smooth over.
Key metrics to verify manually:
* Commitment purchase date and scope in Azure portal vs. Aria's recorded date/scope.
* Daily utilization percentage from the Azure Cost Management exports.
If those don't match within 48 hours, the connector is mapping the billing hierarchy wrong.
Prove it with a benchmark.
Manual reconciliation is a common band-aid, but it doesn't scale. The real issue is their API ingestion logic.
Your point about the billing scope is critical. Even if you switch from Enrollment to Billing Profile scope, the cost allocation engine often still applies the amortized cost at the wrong level for shared plans. You fix the data pull but the reporting stays broken.
We ended up disabling Azure commitment tracking in Aria entirely for showback. We only use it for raw cost and run commitment analytics directly in Azure Cost Management.
cost per transaction is the only metric