We have a CSP subscription through a partner, and the whole experience is rubbish. Costing / billing APIs not available, can't use our Office 365 Azure AD, can't use SendGrid, can't see the cost of resources in the portal, loads of features missing. It's rubbish.
We're moving away and want to transfer a substantial number of SQL Azure servers (with many pools and databases) and Storage Accounts (with lots of items) to another, new PAYG subscription, which uses our O365 Azure AD.
#AzureSupport on Twitter pointed me to - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/resource-group-move-resources
But this says, "The source and destination subscriptions must exist within the same Azure Active Directory tenant."
It suggests two ways forward:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fundamentals/active-directory-how-subscriptions-associated-directory
But... The "Change Directory" option is not present for CSP accounts (lo and behold! another missing feature)
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/billing/billing-subscription-transfer
But.. Heading to https://account.windowsazure.com/Subscriptions as instructed gives me a 500 error, with "We are sorry, but we could not complete that operation.".
Also.. Of course, the CSP (Ingram) do not offer any of these kinds of options on their sub management portal.
#AzureSupport then recommended I post here.
Can anyone advise / help please? Would be very much appreciated, thank you.
You are currently blocked, as there is not a good workflow to migrate from CSP to Pay-as-you-go, as the below User Voice entry suggests others are looking for the same. Please up vote and comment on this.
Change subscription from CSP to pay-as-you-go
As for getting switched back to PAYG, I suggest exporting your data and importing in to new services that have been set-up under your desired account set-up. If you need the instance names, these will need to be deleted before the data can be imported into the newly created service with the existing instance names, in cases where instances names can be reused after deletion of the particular service.
There is currently no supported means to migrate a subscription away from CSP once migrated, from my investigation.
Use Azure Data Migration Service to migrate from source to target. This though, will not allow you to keep the same instance names, as both the source and target will need to exist at the same time.
Related
I have started using my free Azure account and I found out that I cannot create SQL Managed Instance. I get a cryptic error message telling me to change subscription or region, no clear information. The list of free services does not include SQL MI but it does not mean much. SQL Dedicated Pool or Synapse are also not listed but I tried to create them and the Portal does not complain yet even though I did not click the final Create button yet.
So SQL Managed Instances are only available on certain subscription types. See:
You probably have an Azure Trial subscription. If not, you might also want to check your region as there are region limitations as mentioned in the article above.
I've got all my stuff under a subscription that got disabled (changed the employer). I registered a new one (pay-as-you-go on my own credit card). Attempting to move the deactivated sites to the new one failed and the portal says:
Resources cannot be moved from disabled subscriptions.
I've followed the link provided and googled around finding that "...source and destination subscriptions must be active...". That's not very helpful in my case as I have no means to make the admins managing the old subscription reactivate it, not even for a short while.
Do I have to scratch everything and re-publish the application? It won't let me do that on the same URL (and re-configurating the SQL server/DB might cause addition issues). Google gave me nada and I wonder if there's a way to simply move the stuff somehow in the portal.
I can't wait for the reply from MS support because the site manages a register for people with some mental disabilities and not being able to access the material is a huge blow on their daily peace.
Oh, I'm running the site pro-bono (out of my own pocket for the unfortunate souls) so a solution that's pricey might be a show-stopper.
This happened to me. Go to the subscription and reactive it by converting it to a pay-as-you-go subscription. Then you can download and move resources. If you don't need the subscription after that, you can delete it.
I'm fairly new to Azure. I have a personal website in the cloud and played around with some stuff, but that's it. Since I have my first client project coming up in which I will use certain Azure functionality, I was wondering on how to deal with billing.
I will of course put all the resources needed for the client under a new resource group, but the thing I'm wondering about is which subscription to link that resource group to.
Option 1 :
I link it to my own subscription. Least interesting as I would have to send the client an invoice every month charging him the costs that I made through my subscription for his project.
Option 2 :
I add a new subscription under my Azure account, using the client's credit card. This is the most interesting for me as I can see all resources under my Azure account and the client gets billed automatically. But you have to convince the client to give you their credit card information so you can create the subscription.
Option 3 :
The client makes his own Azure account, with a subscription under that account using his credit card. This is less interesting for me as I have to manage 2 Azure accounts. But it's more interesting for the client as they can create their own account and don't have to give me their credit card details.
What's the typical way to go about this? Are there other options that I'm missing? Thanks!
This is a poor question over all (for Stack Overflow at least). But common sense says:
they give you access to their subscription(s)
you create resources in your subscriptions, bill them.
We are a software company so we setup solutions for the other companies. I guess we are not unique in this regards :) so I would like to know if we should create a new subscription each time or just a resource group.
Requirements:
We should be able to bill each customer/project separably
They should be able to take control of their resources easily and move to another company
Managing them should not be a headache
What we have tried
We've tried adding a subscription for each customer. This way, we could just change the admin profile and they could completely move away from us.
The billing is also OK, since we receive a different email for each subscription, but managing them is becoming a real headache.
What I guess could work
From what I read, I guess we could work with resource groups instead of subscriptions and handle the billing part with tags (haven't tried it yet. can we?) but then I'm afraid of not being able to move it to another subscription when they've asked us.
Is it even possible? How easy is that? Does it envolve contacting support?
Has anyone tried it?
I would advise against billing using resource groups and tags. The reports are a real mess and 100% unusable. Also, its a lot of extra work for nothing (seriously, do you care if you have 1 subscription or 10?) and adds no real benefit.
Also, you can move resources across subscriptions of different tenants. Best way of handling this is doing a subscription move. That way you dont have to do anything else. They just link your subscription to another tenant and you are good.
I'm talking from a perspective of administering dozens of subscriptions, and believe me, if you move away from subscriptions to resource groups (as a billing\security boundary) you will get completely devastated by the increased complexity of what you are doing.
In my experience working with organisations that provide similar hosting services to customers, I'd say resource groups is the way to go to avoid too much segregation. It's easier for you to keep control of the resources as well as keeping the cost low if you decide to use shared compute resources such as Application Gateway, DDOS protection, etc.
Bear in mind that depending on what level of permission you're giving to your clients, they might have access to information from other clients, so it's important to come up with a good security and governance plan for the Azure environment and strictly limit what they can access.
Moving things from one subscription to another is easy as long as you're using resources within the supported move list. Check the list below:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/resource-group-move-resources
You don't have to open a ticket with Microsoft to move these resources and the move can be easily done through the portal interface as long as you select all the resources and it's dependencies and you have access to both subscriptions. If your client decides to move their stuff to their own Azure subscription, they will have to give you permission on that. If the resource you're trying to move is not in the supported list, not even Microsoft can move that.
From a billing perspective, I'd say separating by RG and using tags is the way to go as that can be easily filtered in your exported Azure consumption usage report.
In my Azure environment I am often tinkering around, adding new services, scaling roles up and down, etc. The problem is that I am always unsure as to how I may have affected my monthly bill. I'm also scared of forgetting to kill services after I don't need them (for example, I mistakenly had a Reporting Service running for a few weeks - very expensive!).
I'm looking for an add-on or service which can give be a basic idea of how much money I am consuming in Azure. I don't need something complicated. A graph or two could be great (perhaps a burn down).
I found these but without luck:
Foglight for Azure: This didn't work for me. All my figures showed up as 0.
Active Cloud Monitoring: This has been removed from the Azure add-ons.
Does anyone know of such a solution?
thank you for the question and the feedback. The new Azure portal, which is currently in public preview, does have this feature. You can try out the new portal at https://portal.azure.com/ . Once there, click on Billing tab on the left of the screen, which should bring up a billing summary for all your subscriptions. Click on the subscription that you need to check, and that will show you the billing details for that subscription. Details include subscription status, days left, current charges, burn down, and a breakdown of current charges by resource.
Please try this out and send your feedback using the "Give feedback" link at the top of the new portal page. You will have to click on your account name to see the "Give feedback" option in the drop down.
If you are using "Enterprise Agreement" as a billing option, the Azure portal does not provide sufficient billing information.
You could use Microsoft Power BI to import the data from Azure and use it for reporting. In Power BI you can use the Content pack "Microsoft Azure Enterprise" and connect it to your subscription. You will need the Enrollment number for your Enterprise Agreement and an API key to access the data.
A detailed explanation can be found in this blog entry.