Reports, exports, Advisor recommendations, and cost allocation

CostRadar reports turn Azure billing data into reviewable summaries for engineering, operations, and finance conversations. Reports are designed to support investigation, not replace your official Azure invoice.

Reports and exports

CostRadar supports report views such as monthly summaries, top resources, service breakdowns, resource group views, anomaly history, and cost optimization summaries. Exports may be available as CSV or PDF depending on the report.

Use exports when you need to share a point-in-time view with stakeholders. If a current-month export changes later, that usually reflects Azure refining the underlying billing data.

Azure Advisor recommendations

CostRadar surfaces cost recommendations generated by Microsoft Azure Advisor. CostRadar does not create or guarantee those recommendations. Review each recommendation in the context of reliability, performance, commitments, and business needs before acting.

Advisor recommendations require Azure read visibility to the resources associated with the recommendations. Built-in subscription Reader covers this. Storage Blob Data Reader alone is enough to read export files, but it does not provide Advisor or resource/tag metadata access.

Cost allocation

Cost allocation views help you inspect spend by dimensions such as subscription, service, resource group, resource, and tags where data is available. Tag quality matters: missing or inconsistent Azure tags can limit allocation accuracy. If the service principal lacks subscription read visibility, Storage Export ingestion can still read cost files, but resource/tag enrichment may be limited to what Azure includes in the export rows.

CostRadar can show what Azure billing data contains, but it cannot infer every ownership boundary if resources are untagged or shared across teams.

Good review habits

• Compare current month reports with the data freshness timestamp.
• Use prior completed months for finance reconciliation.
• Validate recommendations with resource owners before making changes.
• Treat estimated savings as directional until your team confirms them.