Tag Archives: azure

Boost your N-Tier Business Model with Cloud Costs Reseller Management

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Microsoft launched the Cloud Solution Provider Program with two different partner models. A Direct Cloud Solution Partner (CSP) deals directly with Microsoft and sells the resources from Microsoft to his customers. The direct CSP has the requirement to process all the purchases through his e-commerce portal against the Microsoft Partner Center. Creating new customers or registering new subscriptions is part of the direct CSPs role.

Compared to the direct model the Indirect Cloud Solution Provider is a company working together with a direct CSP to purchase Cloud resources. Microsoft delegated the billing process and the transparency requirement to the Direct CSP. Cloud Cost can help a lot in simplifying this process by offering a management portal for Direct CSPs, Indirect CSPs and Customers of CSPs.

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Cloud Costs is happy to announce the Reseller Management functionality. Resellers can be managed and used for all kind of contracts independent from the Microsoft CSP program, so Cloud Costs is the single solution on the market which extends the CSP business model to EA, AWS and GCP contracts as well. This new feature can also be used to delegate the management of a part of a contract to a subsidiary, daughter company or external service provider.

Just activate your first reseller by visiting the Reseller Management Portal in Cloud Costs:

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Last but not least assign multiple customers to the newly created reseller in the CSP portal:

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A simple and easy jump start into your N-Tier Business Model to become a more powerful Cloud Solution Provider.

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

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

VARs handle Managed Services on Azure and Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform at ease

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Cloud Solution Providers often deliver important and market-relevant solutions based on Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform to their customers. These solutions are often related to a consumption-based or tier-based pricing related to the consumed resources in the cloud services. Customers expect transparency and real-time information regarding cloud spending aggregated in a holistic solution including the value-added services provided by a Cloud Solution Provider.

Cloud Costs is happy to introduce the Virtual Service Meters functionality which is available in all regions right now. Virtual Service Meters allows managing the billing and pricing aspects of managed services delivered from Cloud Solution Providers.

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The powerful and easy to use JavaScript-based logic engine allows modeling any kind of managed service. Combining Virtual Service Meters and Cloud Costs powerful REST API enables every Cloud Solution Provider to prepare a robust, transparent and consistent billing chain for cloud-based services.

BillingChain

Looking for more technical information? Feel free to visit our development sandbox for Virtual Service Meters with comprehensive technical documentation to integrate new meters right away.

> Open Development Sandbox <

Interested in the new feature?
Try the new feature today by simply logging into your Cloud Costs account as Cloud Solution Provider. The feature is part of any paid cloud solution provider plan.

Getting started with Cloud Costs for CSPs is very easy, just visit our portal for Cloud Solution providers and enroll in the CSP program as described above. To become part of the CSP support an existing trial account or an enterprise plan is required.

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

Act like a CSP/MSP with your Enterprise Agreement (EA)

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Today we’re very excited to announce the availability of our Enterprise Agreement support for the Azure Costs Cloud Solutions Providers platform.

Several months ago, Microsoft introduced the Cloud Solution Provider program . This program enables companies from the technical and the business perspective, to resell Azure resources or complex solutions on top of the Azure cloud.  

Azure Costs supports the Cloud Solutions Provider program since day one and has a lot of experience in processing Enterprise Agreements. Therefore we’re very happy to now release our Enterprise Agreement support for the Azure Costs CSP platform. This update brings together both business models, Enterprise Agreements and CSP Partners. Azure Costs allows you to use Enterprise Agreements in the same way as CSP accounts.

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This new option supports your migration from an Enterprise Agreements based Managed Service Provider to a real Cloud Solution Provider. Just combine all the different costs in a single and holistic portal. In addition, there are some important features dedicated to Enterprise Agreement customers only:

Define customers based on every property of your choice: 
As the Enterprise Agreement does not support customers out of the box, Azure Costs adds this functionality and gives every EA contract holder the same features as you have in the CSP ecosystem.

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Define Cloud Solution Provider Margins:
This allows every CSP to differentiate between the pricing Microsoft offers to the EA and the price the CSP offers for the customer. Just define the different pricing tier per customer individually.

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Generate Cloud Solution Provider Filters:
This allows to hide services which are not charged for the customer. Only services targeted by the CSP filter will appear in the customer portal.

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Offer a customer spending portal besides a reseller spending Portal:
This allows your customers to manage the spendings by their own. This portal gives your customers 100% the same features incl. team management as if they would sign up to Azure Costs with an enterprise edition directly and an EA contract.

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

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

Revised Spending Analytics Engine for Cloud Solution Providers

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Today we’re very excited to announce the availability of the revised spending analytics engine for cloud solution providers. All of the enhancements focus on more accuracy and productivity, when working with your customers on a daily basis.

Since Azure Costs is supporting direct cloud solution providers also called CSP Tier 1, we work together with many different CSPs around the globe. The analytics engine in Azure Costs is one of the most important components and ensures that the spending data is aggregated well and all processes like up-scale a resource are outlined and calculated correctly.

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As a service in Microsoft Azure consists of many parts we’ve decided to focus on the development of the analytics engine to understand the different meters correctly. This gives us the possibility to invest more in predictions and recommendations based on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Especially complex situations like an out-scale event can now be visualised very easily.  

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The new engine will be rolled out to all customers within several waves and after an opt-in phase it will become our standard engine. For now every CSP needs to switch directly in the data view generated with the new engine by selecting the action shown above.  In addition the spending dashboard of every single customer can be moved to the new engine manually as show bellow:

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This prevents that we disturb customers of a cloud solutions provider by accident.

Interested in the new feature?
Getting started with Azure Costs for CSPs is very easy, just visit our portal just 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.

Cost Management for CSPs

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Today we are happy to announce the availability of Azure Costs for Cloud Solution Providers.
Cloud Solution Providers are facing a serious challenge concerning the Microsoft Partnership. The whole process of generating transparency for consumed cloud resources of their customers, managing the billing process and offering support is on the cloud solutions providers desk. Our cost management for CSPs has the intention to deliver all the tools a CSP needs to implement this part of the value chain.  The offering targets three important dimensions a cloud solution provider needs to cover:

Manage customers, accounts & partners

Azure Costs allows to manage all accounts, customers & partners in the complex n-tier business model of the Microsoft CSP Program. This includes a custom spending portal to analyse and manage the performance of every partner and customer including alerts and the powerful mail spending report. Supporting custom markups, discounts and margins allows to adjust the cost structure to the dedicated business model of every CSP.

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Offer billing portal capabilities

Staying on top of the cloud usage is easy for CSP customers when their KPIs are right in front of them. The Azure Costs Spending Dashboard provides a clear and crisp overview, containing all important cost- and usage-KPIs at a glance for all CSP cloud customers and partners. Last but not least the billing portal offered to every partner and customer allows to deliver the required transparency a CSP is enforced to offer not only for Azure but also for other services like Office 365.

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Multi Clouds & Custom Solutions management

Including self-developed cloud solutions and 3rd party services in the spending management infrastructure gives customers a single pane of glass to track, optimize and govern their spendings. As an essential part of the Azure Costs infrastructure, it opens the platform for other cloud vendors like Amazon and Google as well as sub cloud providers like SendGrid. The ability to build and sell cloud solutions e.g. hosted SAP or virtual datacenter implementation allows every CSP to deliver more value instead of just provisioning resources in Azure. virtual-meter

Interested in the new feature?
Getting started with Azure Costs for CSPs is very easy, just visit our csp portal for Cloud Solution providers and enroll into the CSP program as described above. More information about every feature in detail and the available plans can be found here.

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

Feature Update for CSP Support

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Today we’re very excited to announce some great feature updates for our Cloud Solution Providers platform. All the updates focus on more accuracy and productivity, when working on a daily basis with your customers.  

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The following list describes all features in detail and gives you a brief overview on how to use them:  

Defining Cloud Solution Provider Margins allows the CSP to differentiate between the pricing Microsoft offers to CSPs and the price the CSP offers for the customer. Just define the different pricing tier per customer individually

  azure costs - azure cloud cost optimization made easy 2017-07-21 07-35-23
Generate Cloud Solution Provider Filters allows to hide services which are not charged for the customer. Only services targeted by the CSP filter will appear in the customer portal. azure costs - azure cloud cost optimization made easy 2017-07-21 07-36-13
Offer a customer spending portal beside a reseller spending portal allows your customers to manage the spendings by their own. This portal gives your customers 100% the same features incl. team management as if they would sign up to Azure Costs with an enterprise edition directly and an EA contract. azure costs - azure cloud cost optimization made easy 2017-07-21 07-36-48

Interested in the new feature?
Getting started with Azure Costs for CSPs is very easy, just visit our new portal just 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.

 

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.