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

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.

Managing multiple CSP, EA and AWS accounts made easy – Service Provider Portal

Being a successful Multi-Cloud Solution Provider means often ending up with a contract sprawl by supporting Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform in different regions for different currencies. At least Microsoft enforces cloud solution providers to sign up for one contract per currency. Consolidation and M&A activities could also become a reason for ending up with multiple CSP contracts in different currencies.

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The Cloud Costs CSP portal allows every Cloud Solution Provider to track, manage and optimize spendings including offering customer spending portals for the required transparency the majority of customers need. The new Service Provider Portal offers another visualization and an aggregated view on all CSP, EA and AWS contracts at the same time.

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The new consolidated view through all contracts allows you to align different contract currencies to the standard currency of your company. These make it easier to compare markets to each other, never miss an emerging market.

Interested in the new feature?
Getting started with Cloud Costs for CSPs is very easy, 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

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.

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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.

Support for Amazon Web Services

Focusing on just a single cloud provider is like having only one single data center without any redundancy. Many customers focused on a virtual data center strategy take care of high availability, fault tolerance and disaster recovery. We will support this activities by introducing the upcoming integration of Amazon Web Services into the Azure Costs spending management platform.

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Together with the Amazon Web Services Team the Azure Costs team is able to re-define the way to manage cloud spendings on a cloud vendor independent platform. We are happy to invite you for an exclusive access to the Amazon Web Services Beta program in Azure Costs. Please register here:

Register now

We will send you technical details for getting access to our beta program and will keep you updated regarding product news.

Interested in the new feature?
Getting started with Azure Costs for AWS is very easy, just register for our closed beta as described above. To become part of the private beta an existing free basic 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

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

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

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

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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

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.
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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.
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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

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

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.