Real-world costs for using a Cloud Management Gateway (CMG) with ConfigMgr

A few days ago I asked my fellow tweeps for some real-world numbers of the cost of using the pretty amazing CMG feature for ConfigMgr. The CMG Platform as a Service (PaaS) is using a A2 V2 instance which will determine the minimum cost, but, obviously, the price will vary depending on usage, downloads, and storage costs etc.

Typically the CMG costs around $100 per month per instance, no matter if you're managing 50 devices or 5000 you will pay that fee. Data is then so cheap ($0.087 at its most expensive) that it doesn't really add much to the total cost for smaller environments.

Note: CMG does support BranchCache, and if you have remote branch offices where clients are using a CMG, you can reduce the download cost quite a bit by leveraging peer to peer.

TL;DR

Using a CMG is in general not very expensive at all.

The Numbers

Below is what I got so far, but if you can, please share your numbers in the comments below, and I'll update the post.

  • Org with 300 devices using CMG, monthly cost about 100 USD. Cost per device: 0.33 USD
  • Org with 500 devices using CMG, monthly cost about 105 USD. Cost per device: 0.21 USD
  • Org with 700 devices using CMG, monthly cost about 100 USD. Cost per device: 0.14 USD
  • Org with 2200 devices using CMG, monthly cost about 100 USD. Cost per device: 0.05 USD
  • Org with 3500 devices using CMG, monthly cost about 140 USD. Cost per device: 0.04 USD
  • Org with 9000 devices using CMG, monthly cost about 350 USD. Used to host 250 GB of applications, hourly policy refresh, and weekly HW/SW inventory. Cost per device: 0.04 USD
  • Org with 75000 (75K) devices using CMG, monthly cost about 1600 USD. Details: 600 USD for instances, 100 USD for storage, and 900 USD for about 15 TB of data download. Cost per device: 0.02 USD
  • Org with 100000 (100K) devices using CMG, monthly cost about 3050 USD. Details: 500 USD for instances, 50 USD for storage, and 2500 USD for about 40 TB of data download. Cost per device: 0.03 USD

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Johan Arwidmark

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Anoop Nair
1 year ago

Nice one Johan as always. I have seen the admin console calculator for CMG somewhere but never seen this in production though. Do you remember seeing the same?

Don
Don
2 years ago

Hi. On my CMG I see a very constant (steady in average all over the 24 hours) storage account egress of about 100MB per hour – clients are usually offline at night so I would expect almost no traffic at night – any thoughts to that ?

Niksa
Niksa
2 years ago

Hi Johan,
What I cannot figure out is how egress gets larger by device in terms of software deployment. For example, if I deploy OS image that's 5GB in size to some laptops, would egress then be 5GB * number of laptops?
I am worried that my Azure bill will skyrocket if I deploy such OS to, say 5000 devices?

Last edited 2 years ago by Niksa
Oleksii
Oleksii
2 years ago

Hello Johan,
Thank you for your post.
But I'm still confused, because price mentioned for Azure VM, but VM itself has a OS disk, what type it used (Standard HDD, SSD or Premium SSD), also Microsoft says that CMG use an Azure LRS storage, but what type: Blob, File, Table; Performance Tier: Standard. Premium?
Price in regards of storage just for Egress traffic but not for Azure Storage account itself do I need take into consideration that as well?
Thank you very much in advance!

Mike
Mike
3 years ago

do these costs include the cost of the vm (Cloud Service) + egress + storage?

Bo Bertelsen
Bo Bertelsen
3 years ago

Around 2200 Clients and 97 usd monthly


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