How much does Azure Update Management cost?

The Azure Update Management cost is free, up to a certain point. There are no separate charges to use the patching tool, but access to complementary features might affect the bottom line.

Azure Update Management is part of the Azure Automation service. Organizations can use the capabilities and features of Azure Update Management at no cost. Users can check a system's status and deploy updates across the environment without any extra fees.

However, Azure Update Management relies on logs to track systems and drive update behaviors, and those logs are typically stored in the Azure Log Analytics service. Charges can add up when using Azure Log Analytics -- now part of the cloud monitoring tool Azure Monitor -- for Azure Update Management log data ingestion and storage.

Consequently, the collateral cost for Azure Update Management will largely depend on the size of the environment.

For example, East Coast U.S. region users can access up to 5 GB per month of data ingestion and use 31 days of log data storage as part of a free tier, then pay $2.30 per GB of ingested data and $0.10 per GB of stored data per month after that.

Consequently, the collateral cost for Azure Update Management will largely depend on the size of the environment. That is, larger environments with more systems under management will typically generate more log data and require more stored data, driving up the Azure Update Management cost for the business.

As with all projects that work on a cloud consumption model, it's worth the effort to estimate the financial impact of these services in advance, and then track the charges over the duration of a pilot program to ensure the expenses are in line with expectations.