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For comparison, the invoice provided by Azure is inherently itemized. "X hours of Compute at Y rate", "X units of storage on PREMIUM/STANDARD storage type", et

For comparison, the invoice provided by Azure is inherently itemized. "X hours of Compute at Y rate", "X units of storage on PREMIUM/STANDARD storage type", etc. Edit: Sample invoice: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38805 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=388...

jdc0589 9y ago
the azure billing report is a disaster; they seem to be slowly fixing it though. The line items are tricky and usually not super human friendly, multiple billable resources roll up to single items with weird quantities in some instances, if you have mixed ARM and ASM resources only the ARM stuff in your usage report will have data for tags (cause there's no concept of inheritance from parent resource group), ARM and ASM resources have different formats for some common fields, and tons more I've repressed from memory. If you have an EA agreement, half (or more?) of the billing report interfaces don't work. If you have to use the EA portal due to an EA agreement....lets just say within the past year they have been through some rough periods of random undocumented format changes, magically disappearing billing reports for a few hours at a time, random intermixed windows and linux style line endings in the same file, periods where they are DAYS behind your actual usage, etc... Source: I wrote a infrastructure inventory and billing/usage aggregation system that normalizes data from Azure, AWS, and vCenter to help our company easily track spending by service, tags, etc... across all of platforms where we have a presence.
Dunedan 9y ago
That's what you get with the "Detailed Billing Reports" (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/billing-reports.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...) for AWS as well as mentioned in the article. That still doesn't solve the problem of making sense of each item. So what's the advantage of the Azure invoices?

jdc0589 9y ago

the azure billing report is a disaster; they seem to be slowly fixing it though. The line items are tricky and usually not super human friendly, multiple billable resources roll up to single items with weird quantities in some instances, if you have mixed ARM and ASM resources only the ARM stuff in your usage report will have data for tags (cause there's no concept of inheritance from parent resource group), ARM and ASM resources have different formats for some common fields, and tons more I've repressed from memory. If you have an EA agreement, half (or more?) of the billing report interfaces don't work. If you have to use the EA portal due to an EA agreement....lets just say within the past year they have been through some rough periods of random undocumented format changes, magically disappearing billing reports for a few hours at a time, random intermixed windows and linux style line endings in the same file, periods where they are DAYS behind your actual usage, etc... Source: I wrote a infrastructure inventory and billing/usage aggregation system that normalizes data from Azure, AWS, and vCenter to help our company easily track spending by service, tags, etc... across all of platforms where we have a presence.

Dunedan 9y ago

That's what you get with the "Detailed Billing Reports" (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/billing-reports.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2...) for AWS as well as mentioned in the article. That still doesn't solve the problem of making sense of each item. So what's the advantage of the Azure invoices?