Custom Widgets: Optimize your cloud spendings as personal as you are

Posted on December 1, 2019 by de

Cloud Costs offers more and more capabilities and allows you to generate reports to cover all requirements in your organization when it comes to multi-cloud spend management and optimization.

Cloud Costs is happy to introduce a brand new feature called Custom Widgets for all kinds of dashboards, including the CSP portal. The new capability is available in all regions for all paid plans starting from the StartUp Edition. Custom Widgets allows every user to put every report or every other resource on the surface of his or her personal dashboard to get instant access to critical performance indicators.

Getting started with the new capability can be done within 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Enable the Dashboard Edit Mode
Visit the Dashboard Edit Mode by clicking on the small pen in the upper right corner of the cloud costs dashboard.

Step 2: Select Widget-Type and add details
Select the required widget type and enter the details. Currently, an iFrame widget and a report center-based widget are available.

Step 3: Re-Arrange as needed
Re-Arrange the location of the different widgets that it looks as good as possible for yours. The defined dashboard layout is stored on the cloud and can be re-used on every other device automatically.

The new custom widget feature supports the Report Center fully and allows to bring all reports from the Report Center directly on the dashboard surface

Interested in the new feature?
Try the new feature today by simply logging into your Cloud Costs account. The feature is part of any paid plan. Getting started with Cloud Costs is very easy, just visit our Cloud Costs portal.

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

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

Posted on May 15, 2019 by de

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.

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.

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.

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

Posted on August 8, 2018 by de

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Posted on October 16, 2017 by de

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.

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.

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:

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.

Public Preview CSP Support

Posted on July 31, 2017 by de

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.

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!
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.
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.

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.

Cloud Costs

Multi Cloud Environment Cost Management & Optimization made easy

Tag Archives: csp

Custom Widgets: Optimize your cloud spendings as personal as you are

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