MGDC for SharePoint FAQ: How can I estimate my Azure bill? Updated!

introduction

When you ingest SharePoint data through Microsoft Graph Data Connect, you are billed through Azure. As I write this blog, the price to import 1,000 objects from Microsoft Graph Data Connect in the US is $0.75, plus the cost of Azure infrastructure such as Azure Storage and Azure Synapse.

This is true for all datasets except SharePoint file datasets, which have different billing rates. Due to their typical large volumes, SharePoint Files datasets are billed at $0.75 per 50,000 objects.

I wrote a blog about: what is considered an objectHowever, we often get asked how to estimate the overall Azure bill for Microsoft Graph Data Connect for SharePoint for a specific project. Let me explain things clearly…

Before we begin, here are a few notes and disclaimers:

• Please note that this is an estimate and your specific Azure bill will vary.
• Please check the official Azure link provided. Rates may vary depending on country and time of day.
• This is the Azure pay-as-you-go list price in the US as of October 2024.
• Enjoy Azure discounts, including savings with prepaid plans.

How many objects are there?

To estimate the number of entities, start by determining the number of sites in your tenant. This should include all sites in the tenant (not just active sites). This number can be easily found in the SharePoint admin center. This is the number of objects in the SharePoint site dataset.

Finding the number of SharePoint groups and SharePoint permissions requires a bit of guessing. We recently collected telemetry and found that the average number of SharePoint groups per site for our large sample of tenants is approximately 31. The average SharePoint permissions per site were approximately 61. The average number of files per site was 2,874.

The delta pool (which only collects changes) is smaller but varies depending on the amount of collaboration occurring in the tenant (the delta numbers below assume a 5% change for the average collaboration level).

Below is a table to help you estimate the cost of Microsoft Graph Data Connect for SharePoint.

Notes on the table above:

* We assume that higher collaboration levels double the average in terms of groups, permissions, and files.
** Security scenarios include sites, groups, and permissions. Capacity scenarios include sites and files.
*** Delta assumes a 5% change for average cooperation and a 10% change for high cooperation. This is on the high side compared to the change over a week. Your numbers will be smaller.

As you can see, a small tenant with average collaboration will see costs of less than $10 for small site datasets and less than $1,000 for larger datasets such as permissions or files.

If you want to estimate the number of SharePoint objects more accurately, you have the option to sample the data set and get the total number of objects rather than importing the entire data set. For more information, see: MGDC for SharePoint FAQ: How can I sample or estimate the number of objects in a dataset?

Official information about Microsoft Graph Data Connect pricing can be found here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/graph-data-connect/

How much storage space is there?

SharePoint information obtained from Microsoft Graph Data Connect is stored in an Azure Storage account. It also incurs some costs, but these are usually small compared to Microsoft Graph Data Connect costs for data import. Storage is proportional to the number of objects and their size.

Again, this will depend on how collaborative your tenants are. More sharing means more members in the group and more people in authority, which leads to more objects and larger objects.

We also estimated object sizes and arrived at approximately 2 KB per SharePoint site object, 20 KB per SharePoint group object, 3 KB per permission object, and 1 KB per file object. There are several Azure storage options, including standard and premium, LRS and GRS, v1 and v2, and hot and cool. For Microsoft Graph Data Connect, Standard + LRS + V2 + Cool Blob Storage accounts are available and cost $0.01 per GB per month.

Below is a table to help you estimate Azure Storage costs.

The same notes from the previous table apply here.

As you can see, the average collaborative small tenant will have storage costs of less than $1000 per month, and most will be storing larger file datasets. Delta data set storage costs are also quite small, even for the largest tenants. There is an additional cost per storage operation such as reads and writes, but it is negligible at this scale (e.g. $0.065 per 10,000 writes and $0.005 per 10,000 reads).

For official information about Azure Storage pricing, see: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/

What about Synapse?

Additionally, you typically use Azure Synapse to move SharePoint data from Microsoft 365 to your Azure account. You can run the pipeline every day to obtain information and perform some basic processing, such as calculating deltas or generating aggregates.

Here are some of the things you’ll be billed for for Azure Synapse when running a Microsoft Graph Data Connect pipeline:

• Azure Hosting – Integration Runtime – Data Movement – ​​$0.25/DIU-hour
• Azure Hosting – Integration Runtime – Pipeline Activities (Azure Hosting) – $0.005 per hour
• Azure Hosting – Integration Runtime – Orchestration Activity Execution – $1 per 1,000 executions
• vCore – $0.15 per vCore hour

As with Azure Storage, the costs here are small. You may need one pipeline run per day, which typically runs in less than an hour for small tenants. Large tenants may require several hours per run to collect all SharePoint data sets. You should expect to pay less than $10 per month for small tenants and less than $100 per month for larger and/or collaborative tenants.

Official information about Azure Synapse pricing can be found here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/synapse-analytics/

Closing Note

This is a basic meter in Azure to help you get started with the costs associated with Microsoft Graph Data Connect for SharePoint. We recommend experimenting with a small test/development tenant to become familiar with Azure billing.

For more information about Microsoft Graph Data Connect for SharePoint, see the following links: https://aka.ms/SharePointData.