Nerdio Manager for Enterprise (NME) gives AVD administrators a clear picture of what their environment costs and where money can be saved — without requiring anyone to become an Azure billing expert. Rather than exposing raw Azure invoices, NME layers pricing data over the usage telemetry it already collects from your environment, then presents the result as actionable estimates, savings figures, and dashboards.
This article explains how NME's key cost-aware features source Azure pricing data, how they calculate and manipulate that data, and what an admin actually sees in the product.
Important
The figures NME produces are estimates and projections, not reconciled billing. They are designed to guide decisions and demonstrate value, and they are built from Microsoft's own published pricing.
Nerdio Advisor scans your environment and produces prioritized optimization recommendations, each attached to a projected cost impact. The goal is simple: show admins which changes will save the most money, so effort goes where it matters.
Advisor pulls pricing from Microsoft's publicly available Azure pricing APIs — the same open sources Microsoft publishes for its retail rates. No private billing access is required; the pricing side of the calculation comes entirely from these public feeds.
Advisor combines two inputs: the price of a resource (from Azure pricing APIs) and the observed uptime percentage of that resource in your environment. Multiplying price by observed uptime produces a projected monthly cost. Advisor then models the same resource under the recommended change and produces a second projection. The difference is the estimated impact of acting on the recommendation.
Advisor constructs a projected monthly cost by applying public pricing to observed usage (price × uptime, extrapolated across the month). This is the baseline figure everything else is measured against.
It then surfaces this through three related advisors:
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Right-sizing — automatically analyzes actual usage data across your Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows 365 environment and recommends smaller or larger VM SKUs and host pool scaling settings.
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Platform TCO — Aggregates these estimates into a total-cost-of-ownership view across the platform. For both AVD and Windows 365.
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License Suitability — Assesses whether current licensing is appropriate for observed usage, flagging cases where a different licensing choice would be more cost-efficient.
Executive Insights is a high-level dashboard built for leadership and non-technical stakeholders. It answers the question executives actually ask: "What are we getting for our AVD investment?"
Executive Insights uses the Azure Cost Management API to retrieve actual resource costs directly from Azure — not estimates derived from pricing tables. This is distinct from how Advisor and Auto-Scale Savings work.
Important
Requires customer action: Cost data is only collected for subscriptions where the customer has explicitly enabled Cost Management API read access in NME settings. If access is not granted for a subscription, Executive Insights will not show cost data for it.
NME only retrieves costs for resources it manages or is related to:
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Resources tagged by NME (managed resources)
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Resources that are part of NME's own infrastructure (NME-related resources)
Unrelated resources in the same subscription are excluded.
The feature aggregates actual cost and usage metrics over time, packaging them for a leadership audience. Rather than per-resource detail, it emphasizes trends, breakdowns, and summaries.
User Cost Attribution (UCA) is a cost report that distributes the costs of your AVD environment to users according to their usage. It supports chargeback and showback scenarios — giving departments or cost centers visibility into their share of AVD spend.
UCA builds each report by:
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Fetching and caching all relevant data for the month into your configured storage account
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Attributing direct VM costs to users who recorded sessions on those VMs
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Attributing remaining "non-session costs" to all users according to the selected allocation method (unallocated, uniform, or proportional)
UCA pulls from three distinct sources when fetching data:
|
# |
Source |
Used For |
Scope |
Key Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
1 |
Azure Cost Management / Cost Analysis |
Identifying the cost of all resources within the month |
Tags and subscriptions configured in the UCA report |
Historical — can be rebuilt for prior months. Tags are applied during processing, not fetching: UCA fetches full subscription costs then applies tag filters. |
|
2 |
Log Analytics Workspaces (LAW) |
User sessions (WVD Connections table); VM uptime (Heartbeat table) |
Sessions: LAWs connected to the UCA report. VM uptime: all LAWs in subscription |
Requires read permissions on each subscription's LAWs. Dependent on LAW retention (default 30 days) — check retention before reporting on older months. |
|
3 |
Azure Session Host data |
Identifying personal vs. pooled VMs; Host Pool membership |
Subscription set in the UCA report config |
Not historical by default. NME caches environment state at month-end to protect historical reports from configuration changes. |
When processing the fetched data, UCA attributes costs using the following principles:
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Personal VMs/Disks — the full cost is attributed to the assigned user.
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Pooled VMs/Disks — costs are split between users who recorded sessions on each VM, proportional to their share of total session time on that VM. For example, if User A accounted for 50% of session time on VM 1, they receive 50% of VM 1's costs. If no sessions are found for a VM, it is treated as a non-AVD resource and categorized as 'other' costs.
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Non-session costs — all remaining costs that cannot be directly attributed to a user are split across all users in the report according to the selected allocation method (unallocated, uniform, or proportional).
The total cost of a UCA report will always equal the total cost of the nominated subscription(s) in Azure Cost Management. If tag filters are configured, only tagged resources are included and untagged resources are excluded.
Note
UCA bypasses Azure's historical tag context. Normally Azure Cost Management only shows tagged costs from the date tags were applied. Because UCA applies tag filters during processing (not fetching), it considers the full monthly cost of any resource that meets the tag criteria at the time of report generation — regardless of when the tags were applied. Resources must be correctly tagged at the time UCA fetches data to be included.
Additionally, not all Azure resource types support tags in Cost Management. UCA automatically includes SaaS costs (such as Nerdio licensing) within nominated subscriptions to ensure they appear in the cost report. If resources are missing from a report, verify they are correctly tagged and that the resource type supports tags in Azure Cost Management.
Auto-Scale Analytics helps admins understand how auto-scale is performing operationally. This feature does not include a financial or cost component — it is purely operational.
Tip
If you're looking for the dollar value of auto-scale, see Auto-Scale Savings below.
The feature focuses on operational telemetry — session data, scale events, and capacity utilization — to show how auto-scale behavior maps to demand.
Auto-Scale Savings puts a dollar figure on the value auto-scale delivers, showing how much NME saved compared to running hosts at full capacity around the clock.
Like Advisor, Auto-Scale Savings uses Microsoft's public Azure pricing APIs for its rate data. Where possible Nerdio license costs are derived from the deployment, however this is not universally possible. Where this cannot be directly sourced, NME uses the default pricing cost for Nerdio license costs in the calculations.
NME observes the peak count of running VMs at any point in the calculation window and compares that against actual session and usage demand. It models two scenarios:
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Peak-static cost — what the environment would have cost if VMs ran at peak capacity continuously.
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Actual auto-scaled cost — what was actually spent with auto-scale active.
Peak-static cost − actual auto-scaled cost = savings attributed to NME auto-scale.
Note
The date window matters: Because peak VM count is a critical input, the measurement window significantly affects results. Executive Insights uses a fixed window starting from the beginning of the current calendar month, not a rolling 30-day period. A rolling window and a month-to-date window capture different peaks and produce different savings figures — this is expected and by design. The month-start window provides a consistent reference frame aligned to how costs are typically reported.
Admins see a dollar-figure savings estimate that quantifies the value of auto-scale — a direct number to share with stakeholders and demonstrate platform ROI.
|
Feature |
Cost? |
Data Source |
Core Calculation |
What Admins See |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Nerdio Advisor |
Yes |
Azure public pricing APIs + observed uptime |
Price × uptime; before vs. after recommendation |
|
|
Executive Insights |
Yes |
Azure Cost Management API (customer must enable; NME resources only) |
Aggregation of actual resource costs over time. ROI: [(Unoptimized Azure Spend − Optimized Azure Spend) − Nerdio SRP Licensing Costs] / Nerdio SRP Licensing Costs × 100 |
Spend trends, cost breakdowns, savings, utilization summaries |
|
User Cost Attribution |
Yes |
AVD compute cost + session telemetry |
Prorate compute cost by session duration and consumption |
Per-user/group cost in reports and dashboards |
|
Auto-Scale Insights |
No |
Operational telemetry |
Session, scale-event, and capacity analysis |
Auto-scale performance metrics (no cost) |
|
Auto-Scale Savings |
Yes |
Azure public pricing APIs |
Peak-static cost − actual auto-scaled cost |
Dollar-figure savings estimate |
Note
Cost figures produced by Nerdio Advisor, Auto-Scale Savings, and User Cost Attribution are estimates and projections based on Microsoft's published pricing and observed environment usage. They are intended to guide optimization decisions and demonstrate value, and may differ from reconciled Azure billing. Executive Insights uses actual cost data from the Azure Cost Management API where access has been granted.
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