Azure Cost & Capacity

This skill covers the cost, capacity, and inventory side of the azure-mcp connector: the pricing, quota, subscription, and group namespaces. All four are read-only — they answer "what would this cost", "do we have headroom", and "what exists", never "provision this".

Tool names follow the Azure MCP Server's namespace convention (azmcp / azure_mcp prefixes, grouped under pricing, quota, subscription, group). Invoke them by capability.

Anti-triggers

• What the customer was actually billed — pricing returns public retail rates, never invoiced consumption. CSP invoices and margin sit in pax8 or sherweb.
• Where the money is being wasted — cost optimisation findings come from Azure Advisor; use azure-mcp-observability.
• M365 seat counts and licence costs — use cipp-licenses.

Namespace surface

subscription — subscription inventory

Lists the Azure subscriptions the connected service principal can see, with their IDs, display names, and state (Enabled, Disabled, Warned). This is almost always the first call in any workflow — nearly every other namespace needs a subscription ID for scope.

group — resource-group inventory

Lists and inspects resource groups within a subscription: name, location, tags, and provisioning state. Use it to map the shape of an environment, find resources by tag, or pick the right scope for a pricing or quota question.

pricing — Azure retail pricing

Looks up Azure retail prices from the public Azure Retail Prices API — meter rates by service, SKU, region, and currency. This gives list pricing, not the customer's negotiated or EA/CSP pricing, and not actual billed consumption. Treat its output as an estimate baseline.

quota — quota & usage limits

Reports subscription quotas and current usage for a resource provider and region — e.g. vCPU quota for a VM family, public IP count, network interface count. Each entry shows the limit, current usage, and therefore the remaining headroom.

Workflow patterns

Pre-deployment quota check

Before someone scales a deployment or stands up new resources, confirm there is headroom:

1. subscription — resolve the target subscription ID.
2. quota — pull quota and current usage for the relevant provider and region (e.g. Microsoft.Compute vCPUs in eastus).
3. Compare requested capacity against limit - usage. If headroom is insufficient, report the exact shortfall and the region — a quota increase is a separate, write/support action outside this connector.

Catching this before deployment avoids a half-failed rollout when Azure rejects the request at limit.

Cost estimation

When asked "what would X cost":

1. subscription / group — establish scope and region (region materially changes price).
2. pricing — look up the retail meter rate for each SKU involved (compute size, storage tier, bandwidth).
3. Multiply by expected quantity and runtime to produce an estimate.
4. State the assumptions plainly — this is retail list pricing in a stated currency and region. Actual billing depends on the customer's agreement (EA/CSP/MCA discounts), reservations, and real consumption. Never present a retail estimate as the customer's actual or guaranteed cost.

For what a customer actually spent, that is consumption/billing data — the pricing namespace does not provide it. Cost-saving opportunities on existing spend come from Azure Advisor's Cost recommendations (see the observability skill).

Subscription & resource-group inventory

For an environment audit or onboarding discovery:

1. subscription — enumerate all visible subscriptions; flag any Disabled or Warned.
2. group — for each subscription, list resource groups with their locations and tags.
3. Cross-reference tags against the MSP's tagging standard — untagged or mistagged groups are governance findings worth surfacing.

Capacity headroom report

Run quota across the key providers (Microsoft.Compute, Microsoft.Network, Microsoft.Storage) for the regions a customer uses, and produce a headroom table. Quotas above ~80% usage are worth a proactive quota-increase request before they block growth.

Constraints & caveats

• Read-only. This skill estimates, checks, and inventories. It cannot raise a quota, create a subscription or resource group, or apply pricing changes. Quota increases go through an Azure support/quota request — out of scope for this connector.
• Retail vs. actual price. pricing returns public retail rates only. It is an estimation baseline, never the customer's billed amount.
• Scope first. Resolve subscription (and often resource group) before pricing or quota calls — they are scoped operations.
• Visibility is RBAC-bounded. subscription only shows subscriptions where the service principal holds a role assignment. A "missing" subscription usually means a missing Reader assignment, not a deleted subscription.