Dashboard Widgets
Dashboards work best when they read like a short briefing. You start with the headline, you show the evidence, you explain the change, and you end with what to do next.
This page is a guided tour of every tile you can add from the Add Widget modal, written in the same order people naturally ask questions when spend moves. The widget names below match what you will see in the Add Widget library.
A good dashboard answers five questions: How much? Is it changing? What is driving it? Are we at risk? What should we do next?
Every widget reflects the subscriptions you have selected. If a number surprises you, the quickest sanity check is the subscription selector.
The Headline Tiles (Fast Answers, Zero Context Switching)
Spend KPI is the clean opener for most dashboards. It answers the question everyone asks first: what did we spend in the last 30 days, and did that move up or down compared to the 30 days before that? The trend indicator is intentionally blunt; it is there to trigger the next question.
Spend Summary (Circle) is what you reach for when the room wants the variance in plain language. It covers the same 30-day comparison, but makes the change feel real by showing both the percentage and the dollar delta. This is often the widget that turns "I think we're up" into "we're up by this much."
Total Spend KPI and Average Spend KPI provide grounding. Total Spend KPI is the long-range "how big is our cloud investment?" anchor. Average Spend KPI is your baseline: what a normal month tends to look like based on completed billing periods. Together, they keep the conversation from overreacting to a single noisy window.
Available Savings is the counterpart to spend: the headline opportunity. It summarizes the savings range from active cost-saving recommendations and avoids double counting when multiple recommendations point at the same underlying resource. This is the widget you use when you want the dashboard to say, "here is what we could win back."
The Trend Tiles (How The Story Is Evolving)
Billing Period Summary is the finance-friendly view of time. It stays anchored to completed billing periods, shows month-to-month comparisons, and can present both actual and amortized costs when amortized costs are enabled. If you are explaining month close, forecasting, or budgeting, this is usually the most defensible trend widget on the page.
Monthly Spending Trend is the lightweight "shape of spend" chart. It makes it obvious whether the trajectory is rising, falling, or flat, and it is great at revealing seasonality. It deliberately sticks to completed months so the trend line is not distorted by partial data.
Billing Trend Chart is the zoomed-out history lesson. It typically shows up to 12 months of completed billing periods, which makes it useful when you want to connect today's variance to a longer cycle of growth, migration work, or a change in how teams consume services.
The Composition Tiles (Which Services Are Driving The Line)
Cost Over Time is the "what's inside the total?" view. Instead of a single spend line, it breaks the trend down by service so you can see which service families are growing, shrinking, or quietly becoming the real driver of your bill. When one service band thickens over time, you have a concrete lead for where to investigate.
Daily Cost (30 Days) is the same idea, but for short windows and sharp changes. It shows a daily stacked breakdown for the last 30 days so you can spot the exact day a spike started and which service pushed it. It is especially useful during incident-style investigations or right after a deployment that changed scale.
Azure billing data can land a few days late. It is normal for the most recent days in Daily Cost (30 Days) to look incomplete.
The Driver Tiles (Explain The Delta Without Hand-Waving)
In the widget library you will see a tile titled "What drove the change in spend between the selected months?" This is the spend waterfall, and it is one of the most reliable ways to explain variance to both finance and engineering. Read it left to right: each step explains how one service category pushed the total up or down until you land on the new month.
Resource Spending Trends and Costs by Azure Region are where you go next when you need to localize the problem. Resource Spending Trends compares the current 30-day window to the previous 30 days by resource type (for example compute, databases, storage) so you can see which kinds of things are scaling. Costs by Azure Region answers the same question geographically, which is often the quickest way to spot new regional footprint, data-placement decisions, or unexpected expansion into a high-cost region.
The Guardrail Tiles (Budgets As An Early Warning System)
Budget Tracking is a portfolio view across subscriptions that turns budgets into a risk signal. It looks at spend plus forecast and tells you which subscriptions are on track, at risk, or already over budget. The thresholds are intentionally simple: under 95 percent is on track, 95 to 100 percent is at risk, and over 100 percent is over budget. Subscriptions with no budget show as neutral because there is no target to measure against.
Budget Tracking Compact keeps the same meaning but shrinks the footprint so you can keep budget risk visible alongside your trend widgets.
The Action Tiles (Turn Backlog Into A Plan)
Recommendation Summary is the "set the baseline" tile for optimization work. It tells you how many recommendations you have, how many resources they touch, what the potential savings range looks like, and which recommendation category has the highest opportunity. It is a great first widget to add when you want the dashboard to quickly answer, "how much work is here?"
ResourcesContainer Summary and Recommendations Summary Compact are the "where is the noise?" tiles. They break recommendations into Well-Architected pillars and show priority splits, which helps you decide whether urgency is concentrated in high priority work or spread across ongoing improvements.
Recommendation Radar turns that same pillar information into a posture shape. A healthier radar (closer to the outer edge) means fewer open recommendations in that pillar. A tighter radar (closer to the center) means more work is piling up and needs attention.
Recommendation Impact vs Effort is where prioritization becomes concrete. It plots recommendations by effort and expected impact, with bubble size representing scale (such as resource count or cost exposure). The practical use is simple: find the low-effort, high-impact bubbles and you have a "quick wins" queue you can assign immediately.
Savings potential by category is the story you tell after you have a plan. It shows how each savings category reduces monthly cost from today to a potential lower future state. This widget is especially effective for stakeholder updates because it makes the upside legible without asking anyone to interpret charts.
The Portfolio Tiles (Find Outliers Fast)
Subscriptions Table lines subscriptions up side by side across cost, savings ranges, recommendation volume, secure score, and budget status. It is the fastest way to answer, "which subscription is the outlier?" when you manage more than one.
Number of Resources is the simplest "scale vs efficiency" check on the dashboard. When spend rises, this tile helps you separate footprint growth (more resources) from unit cost changes (the same footprint getting more expensive).
The Narrative Tile (Say It In Words)
AI Summary turns the same operational signals into a short stakeholder-friendly narrative. It is most useful when your audience cannot (or should not) spend time interpreting charts, but still needs a faithful summary of what changed and what to do next.
AI Summary is AI-generated text. Treat it as a draft, validate key claims, and confirm with the underlying widgets before you act or share it.
Related Reading
See the Dashboard Overview for broader dashboard workflow and layout guidance: Dashboard Overview