Getting Started with Azure Cost Management for Partners

As a Microsoft partner, Azure Cost Management is a powerful tool that can help you effectively manage and monitor your customers' cloud costs. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the key features and capabilities of Cost Management, and how you can leverage them to gain visibility, control, and optimization of your customers' Azure spending.

Understanding Cost Management Scopes

In Cost Management, there are two main types of scopes: billing scopes and Azure RBAC scopes.

Billing Scopes:

Billing Account Scope: Use this scope to view pre-tax costs across all your customers and billing profiles. This scope shows invoice costs for consumption-based products on the Microsoft Customer Agreement, as well as purchased-based products for customers on both the Microsoft Customer Agreement and the CSP offer.
Billing Profile Scope: Use this scope to view pre-tax costs in the billing currency across all your customers for all products and subscriptions included in an invoice. This scope is helpful for reconciling charges against customer invoices.
Customer Scope: Partners use this scope to manage costs associated with customers that are onboarded to the Microsoft Customer Agreement. This scope allows viewing pre-tax costs for a specific customer in their billing currency.

Azure RBAC Scopes:

Subscription and resource group scopes are used by customers and resellers who have the appropriate Azure RBAC access. Costs are shown at pay-as-you-go retail rates in the customer’s billing currency.

Enabling Cost Management for Customers

To allow customers to view their Azure usage charges at pay-as-you-go rates, partners need to enable the cost visibility policy in the partner tenant. This is done by:

Signing in to the partner tenant and navigating to Cost Management + Billing.
Selecting the relevant billing scope and then the Customers section.
Choosing the customer you want to enable and accessing the Policies section.
Setting the Azure Usage policy to ‘Yes’ to allow the customer to view their costs.

Once the policy is enabled, customers can access Cost Management in their own tenant and view consumption costs for their subscriptions.

Analyzing Costs and Viewing Partner Earned Credits

Partners can use the Cost Analysis tool to deeply analyze their costs, including:

Viewing costs that have received Partner Earned Credits (PEC) due to admin link access.
Filtering, grouping, and saving custom views to gain insights into spending across customers, subscriptions, resource groups, services, and more.

The data fields available in Cost Management, including PEC-specific fields, provide a wealth of information to help partners optimize cloud costs.

Automating Cost Management Tasks

Cost Management’s REST APIs allow partners to automate common tasks, such as:

Exporting cost and usage data to Azure Storage for further analysis.
Programmatically setting up budgets and alerts to monitor and control spending.
Integrating Cost Management data into your own systems and workflows.

By leveraging the APIs, partners can build custom solutions and workflows to better serve their customers' cloud cost management needs.

In conclusion, Azure Cost Management provides partners with comprehensive tools and capabilities to gain visibility, control, and optimization over their customers' cloud spending. By understanding the various scopes, enabling customer access, analyzing costs, and automating processes, partners can deliver exceptional cloud cost management services to their customers. For more information, check out the official Azure Cost Management documentation.