Available as white-label solution

Posted on March 15, 2017 by de

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

Posted on March 8, 2017 by de

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.

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

Posted on March 1, 2017 by de

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.

Advanced Alerting and Burn Rate Reports

Posted on October 30, 2016 by de

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.

alert-dimensions

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

Posted on October 9, 2016 by de

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.

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.

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.

A more powerful azure costs portal

Posted on August 28, 2016 by de

After several months of constant improvements in the new azure costs spending portal it now becomes the standard user interface for all of your spendings.

The new portal offers a lot of new features and improvements to make your day by day work much easier. In this article we would like to highlight only the most important ones, to make your start with the new azure costs spending dashboard as easy and fast as possible:

Overall Spendings The new overall spendings widget allows you to stay informed instantly. The widget always contains all spendings accumulated over the last 12 months.
	Daily Burn Rate An important indicator especially in cost optimization projects but also when you observe your costs on a regular basis is the daily burn rate. It’s easy to oversee what the short and mid term trend is.
Responsible Persons for Subscriptions With this new functionality you are able to assign responsible persons to one or more subscriptions. This helps team administrators to oversee who is the single point of contact (SPOC) in case of unusual spendings.
	Switch Team – Multi Team Support For service providers and administrators who would like to oversee the spendings of several teams, the Multi Team support makes it super easy to handle spendings over different organisations in a single portal.
Smart Compare Smart Compare allows you to conveniently compare monthly cloud costs with the costs of any previous month. azure costs highlights cost spikes & deflections, so that you can focus on the costs you are really interested in.
	Full Screen Mode Every widget can be used in the full screen mode as well. This gives you enough space to work on more complex spending optimization projects without scrolling and moving around. The full screen mode is optimized for working with a huge amount of different data.

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.

Integrate your applications, welcome oAuth2

Posted on July 17, 2016 by de

The Azure Costs team is happy to announce a simplified way to integrate your applications in Azure Costs. Here is how to integrate an application in Azure Costs, that you are developing . This might for example be your BI dashboard or some other enterprise application integration platform that consumes data Azure Costs provides.

Step 1: Create an application principal

Every application which shall be integrated in Azure Costs needs to be registered as a so called application principal within a team account. The technical reason for this is that the authorisation relies on the oauth2 client credentials flow.

The application principal can be used in the same way as an interactive user. This means it’s possible to assign specific permissions to the application principal. All features of the access rights and permissions system can be used out of the box for application principals as well.

There are no limitations, every enterprise subscription allows to create as many application principals as required. In case of exposing the client secret by accident please remove or reset the application registration to prevent unauthorized access to your spending data.

Step 2: Get an access token with the client credentials grant flow

Based on the client credentials grant flows it’s possible to get the access token which needs to be used to communicate with the Azure Costs API following the “Bearer” schema in the authorisation header. The Token can be issued with the following call:

curl -X POST -d “client_id=<<clientId>>&client_secret=<<clientSecret>>&grant_type=client_credentials” https://azure-costs.com/sts/issue/oauth/token

The generated access token is valid for 60 minutes and needs to be renewed after that time with the same request.

Step 3: Consume our APIs

The Azure Costs API is available via https://api.azure-costs.com and follows the REST paradigm. If you need more information please contact us, we will support you with your project.

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 in our dashboards.

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

Feature enhancements

Posted on June 5, 2016 by de

Smart Compare now supports Excel/CSV export
Some weeks ago, we released the new Smart Compare feature, an effective way to compare cloud costs of various months with each other. Now the existing CSV-export functionality is able to export these important results of Smart Compare as well. This enables everyone to find and report cost spikes fast and reliable.

Disable Subscriptions
Azure Costs needs to be connected to every subscription to manage the costs of Pay-as-you-Go or Rate-Plan subscriptions. Not every administrator wants to set the required access permissions for all subscriptions existing in the associated Azure account. Now Azure Costs allows, to disable not needed subscriptions as shown below:

Team Activity Overview
Many team administrators would like to know, if the team members are taking their responsibility for specific subscriptions. Now administrators can see the Last Login information in the Manage Team overview, what gives helpful information if team members are checking cost reports on a regular basis.

How to get started?
All new features can be used right now as part of every plan. 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.

Cloud Costs

Multi Cloud Environment Cost Management & Optimization made easy

Tag Archives: billing

Available as white-label solution

Support for Azure Tag based grouping

Support for Azure Cloud Germany available

Advanced Alerting and Burn Rate Reports

Revised Notification Services

Integrate your applications, welcome oAuth2

Step 1: Create an application principal

Step 2: Get an access token with the client credentials grant flow

Step 3: Consume our APIs

Feature enhancements