Category Archives: Feature Announcements

Public Preview CSP Support

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Today we’re very excited to announce the start of the public preview for Cloud Solution Providers.  After several weeks and months of continous improvements in the azure costs platform, we now start the public preview phase of the CSP support.  

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The great new CSP portal gives you access to the spendings your customers are generating. There are a couple of use cases we would like to point out:  

Enroll into the CSP program:
 When visiting our new CSP portal the system will require enrolling into the CSP program. You can do this with an existing Azure Costs account or in case you would like to differentiate between internal spendings and customer spendings, just use an additional account!

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Register Accounts:
Microsoft requires every CSP to sign into the CSP program for every geographical region separately. As an internal reseller you will have accounts for USD, EUR or AUD and several more. Azure Costs allows you to register every single CSP account, to track costs in different currencies and countries separately.		 7b12c995-0c67-4b6c-b20c-a2c19cae071e
Activate Customers:
 During the registration process Azure Costs imports all existing customers. This does not mean Azure Costs tracks spendings. If you would like to track spendings for a specific customer, activate this customer in the “New/Not-Activated Customers” widget. The spending information of every activated customer will be imported automatically.		 2e47b12a-fbbc-4cad-bcab-3cd2b70fb138

Interested in the new feature?
Getting started with Azure Costs for CSPs is very easy, just visit our new portal for Cloud Solution providers and enroll into the CSP program as described above. To become part of the public preview of the CSP support an existing enterprise plan is required.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

 

Exporting data via API

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Azure Costs now offers direct API access to integrate the processed and aggregated data directly in 3rd party applications like Qlik or Tableau. This option allows customers on an enterprise plan or higher to render or analyse the Azure Costs data in existing BI solutions.

Exporting data via API is very simple. Just follow the steps below:

  1. Register an application as trustee to control which data can be access from the 3rd party application in the team management view.

    ApiCredentials

  2. The application contains a client_id and a client_secret which can be used for the oAuth2 client credentials flow. Just issue a new security token at least every hour from the Azure Costs STS. We recommend to issue a token whenever you start a new transaction to ensure that permission changes are affective.

    curl -X POST -d “client_id={{YOUR CLIENT ID}}&client_secret={{YOUR CLIENT SECERT}}&grant_type=client_credentials” https://azure-costs.com/sts/issue/oauth/token

  3. Export the required report from the export api which returns the data in JSON format. Every single object describes one service including the quantity, costs and other meta information. The required teamId, contract number can be extracted from the URL of the Azure Costs dashboard

    curl -H “Authorization: Bearer {{ISSUED TOKEN}}” https:/api.azure-costs.com/api/v1/teams/{{teamId}}/contracts/{{contractId}}/reports/{{Year}}-{{Month}}/export?cache={{DATE-OF-THE-DAY}}

Interested in the new feature?
Try the new feature today by simply logging into your Azure Costs account. The feature is part of any enterprise plan.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

Service Types and Categories

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Today we’re very excited, to announce the release of our revised service types and service categories for azure costs. In the early days azure costs just supported the Service Type attribute. Together with our customers we identified the need of having a more efficient way to understand cost drives and spending spikes.
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The Service Type property now shows a more detailed type of the Azure Service. Virtual Machines report the selected pricing tier or size in that property . SQL databases are also shown now with the size of the chosen Azure SQL instance.
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In contrast to the Service Type, the Service Category property describes the service class in Azure, e.g. Azure App Services, Data Management which includes BigData and SQL Services or the classical Cloud Services.
The clear differentiation between this two properties should help to identify cost spikes faster and more reliable.

Interested in the new feature?
Try the new feature today by simply logging into your azure costs account. The feature is part of any plan.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

 

Available as white-label solution

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Today we are very excited to announce that Azure Costs can now be offered as a white-label solution for Cloud Solution Providers.

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Using Azure Costs as a white-label solution includes the following features:

Service Provider Specific Top-Level-Domain incl. SSL Certificate:
Offering Azure Costs as white-label solution is delivered under your own service provider specific domain, e.g. costs.acme.com. It’s possible to bind a service provider specific SSL certificate to this domain as well.

Dedicated Storage Backend incl. support for the Azure Cloud Germany:
Every service provider is able to connect a dedicated Azure Storage Account. This ensures that all the customer data are stored and processed only in a service which is under control and management of the service provider.

Custom Identity Provider:
Servicer Provider often offer their customers account and identity infrastructure. Azure Costs as a white-label solution allows to connect custom identity providers based on the oAuth2 protocol. This allows your customers to stay with their existing accounts for the server providers infrastructure.

Interested in offering Azure Costs as a white-label solution?
Try Azure Costs as white-label solution, just contact as via a support request or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com. We will guide you through the signup procedure.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

 

Support for Azure Tag based grouping

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Azure Tags are an efficient way for employees with access to the Azure Management Portal to organize and categorize Azure Services. Besides the Resource Groups, Azure Tags are the second important organisation feature in the Azure Management Portal.

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Azure Costs now imports the Azure Tag definitions and the associated values automatically during the nightly sync. Every Azure Tag is offered as an additional group option for the given spending data. The import works for all contract types including Pay-as-you-Go, Cloud Solution Provider and Enterprise Agreements.

Interested in the new feature?
Try the new feature today by simply logging into your azure costs account. The feature is part of any plan.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

Support for Azure Cloud Germany available

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A couple of weeks ago Microsoft announced the availability of the Azure Cloud Germany. This gives all customers with strong requirements regarding data privacy and who are not able to rely on Privacy Shield the option, to use Azure in two dedicated data centers located in Germany. The most  important detail is that Microsoft chose T-Systems, a daughter company of the German Telecom as the trustee for the German Cloud operations.

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Azure Costs becomes part of the Azure Cloud Germany and is available under the new url

https://azure-costs.de

We are excited to announce that we offer our service in the same quality and with the same performance in the Azure Cloud Germany. Additional information related to the Azure Cloud Germany is available here.

Interested in the new feature?
Try the new feature today by simply logging into your azure costs account with our new german url. All plans are available in Germany as well.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

Stackify recommends Azure Costs

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Matt Watson, Founder and CEO of Stackify published a great article about Azure pricing and cost optimization some days ago. These 22 tips to lower Azure pricing and to optimize hosting costs helps everybody to get the most out of the Azure Services.

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Stackify relies on Azure Costs as their platform to track, optimize and govern Azure spendings. Matt describes in his blog article how Stackify was able to dig deep into their costs structure and optimize cloud spendings for their SaaS service with the help of Azure Costs.

We hope you find these tips to be helpful. Be sure to start with tracking your spendings by signing up for our free basic edition right now.

 

Day-By-Day Spending Tracking and Usability Enhancements

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Today we’re very excited, to announce the release of our updated Azure Costs service. This new version gives you advanced features and functions to manage your spendings more efficient and configure daily reports & alerts more granularly.

Day-by-Day Spendings and quantity reports

Managing costs on a monthly basis is sometimes not enough and to in-accurate for business which runs within days or even hours. Azure Costs now introduces the option to track the spendings on a per day view for every single service.

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This option enables you to identify costs spikes much more efficient and react on them instantly.

Define Notification Settings for Team-Members
A couple weeks ago we introduced the possibility to manage more granular notifications including alert policies. Every team administrator is now able to configure the notification settings for team members in the same powerful way.

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 Aggregation of SQL Backup Exports in EA spendings
Microsoft started counting every single SQL export as a single entry in the service list when the customer is using an enterprise agreement. Azure Costs aggregates this information now correctly per database.

New Filter operations
Sometimes selecting all services which have or do not have a specific tag or which follow or do not follow a specific naming convention is very helpful. The new filter operations notContains and notStartsWith allows to build these kind of filters very easily.

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 Manage a secondary e-mail address
Customers working with Azure Active Directory are sometimes facing the issue that the account address is not the primary contact address. Azure Costs now allows to change this by the team administrator very easily.

 

Interested in the new features?
Try the new features today by simply logging into your azure costs account. The features are part of any plan.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

Advanced Alerting and Burn Rate Reports

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Just two weeks ago we announced the release of our revised notification service for azure costs. This version provided advanced options to configure daily reports and alerts more granularly. This week we are very excited to announce more advanced features regarding our notification services which will help you to keep your cloud spendings under control.

Advanced Alert Dimensions:
Azure Costs now supports more alert dimensions to define more powerful alert policies to support your business needs optimally.

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The following dimension are now available in azure costs:

  • Costs: Triggers an alert when the monthly costs become higher than defined in the limit.
  • Daily Burn Rate (absolute): This dimension triggers an alert when the daily burn rate of that day we send the mail becomes higher than defined in the limit.
  • Daily Burn Rate (relative): The relative difference of the daily burn rate triggers an alert when the change of the daily burn rate between two days becomes higher than defined in the limit. The relative difference calculates all values in percentages.
  • Daily Burn Rate Difference: The absolute difference of the daily burn rate follows the same rules as the relative difference but calculates all values in the currency the contract is managed for.
  • Daily Burn Rate Maximum: The maximum burn rate validates the burn rate of every day in the current month and triggers an alert when one value of a single day becomes higher than the limit.

If you expect more dimensions for your business needs, just let us know. We would happily extend this feature with the help of our customers. Just drop us an e-mail or open a support ticket.

Mail Based Burn Rate Report:
The best indication of costs spikes and unusual behaviour of different users and administrators in your Azure subscriptions is the daily burn rate report. A couple of month ago we introduced this report as part of our improved dashboard. Today we are announcing the integration of the burn rate report as part of our mail report.

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This gives every cost- and spending manager the fastest way to get an overview and generates a call for action only when it’s really required.

Manage Alerts & Notifications for your Team-Mates:
Ensure that all of your team mates are informed on your finger tips. The team management area allows you to define notification and alert policies for every single team member, so that your co-workers will never miss an important information.

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Interested in the new feature?
Try the new feature today by simply logging into your azure costs account. The feature is part of any plan.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

Revised Notification Services

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We’re very excited today, to announce the release of our revised notification service for azure costs. This new version gives you advanced options to configure daily reports and alerts more granularly.

User Based Notification Settings:
Many Team Administrator would like to give their team mates and co-workers the freedom to configure their daily spending report. The new User Based Notification Settings allow administrators and team members to define personal notification settings independently.

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Administrators are now able to recommend corporate standards which can be used or extended from the team members.

Policy Based Alerts:
There are several conditions which trigger an alert. The new policy based alert service allows to define required business rules in azure costs to trigger spending alerts at the right time in the right context.

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How to get started?
The User Based Notification Settings feature can be used right now as part of every paid plan. Policy Based Alerts are part of every professional plan or higher. Try the new features today by simply logging into your azure costs portal.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.