[en] Where does NME show me Azure cost data?

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

[en] It then surfaces this through three related advisors:

[en] For each recommendation, Advisor shows a cost-before and cost-after projection. Admins can sort and prioritize recommendations by financial impact, making it straightforward to tackle the highest-value optimizations first.

[en] 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?"

[en] 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.

[en] NME only retrieves costs for resources it manages or is related to:

[en] Unrelated resources in the same subscription are excluded.

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

[en] UCA builds each report by:

[en] UCA pulls from three distinct sources when fetching data:

[en] When processing the fetched data, UCA attributes costs using the following principles:

[en] 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.

[en] UCA produces cost reports and dashboards within NME showing the attributed cost per user and per group. Admins can use these for internal chargeback (billing departments for their share) or showback (providing visibility without billing).

[en] 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.

[en] The feature focuses on operational telemetry — session data, scale events, and capacity utilization — to show how auto-scale behavior maps to demand.

[en] Admins see metrics on scaling activity and capacity: when scale events fired, how sessions were distributed, and how well capacity tracked demand. The purpose is to tune and validate auto-scale behavior, not quantify its cost.

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

[en] 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:

[en] Peak-static cost − actual auto-scaled cost = savings attributed to NME auto-scale.

[en] 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.

[en] NME cannot calculate figures using customers' Microsoft Reserved Instances or Microsoft Savings Plans as the product has no access to these within the existing permissions setup.