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A Complete E2E Metered Billing for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub

Cloud Assert Billing for Azure Stack Hub enables billing and chargeback within Azure Stack portal. It allows you as an administrator to track the resource consumption across Azure Stack and custom services, compare usage vs quota, configure pricing for Azure Stack resources based on usage meters, integrate with external billing systems, and generate invoices automatically based on real-time usages.

Cloud Assert is the only provider of Billing and Commerce platform for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub that has native integration inside Azure Stack Portal UI and Azure Resource Manager API as a Resource Provider. It allows Enterprises, Service Providers, Re-sellers and End Users to view, track and manage their resource consumption and billing from the same single portal with one-pane glass experience.


Cloud Assert Usage and Billing platform is a matured, battle proven solution with many flexible options to customize and suite diverse marketing and sales needs. It provides you the quickest way to offer rich billing solution on top of the Microsoft Azure Stack Hub portal for all your Charge-back, Show-back, Billing and Reporting needs.

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Administrator Portal

Usage and Billing solution enables you as a service administrator to define multiple pricing models within Azure Stack Hub for all the available services, resource meters, plans and offers.

  • Set different Pricing Profiles for all the Azure Stack Hub Meters
  • Visibility across Resource Usages and its Costs per subscription
  • Run Promotional Credits in a percentage or a monetary value
  • Extensibility and Flexibility to charge customers based on their specifc needs
Learn More on Admin Features Watch Demo

Customer/ Tenant Portal

Just like Azure public cloud, Tenants can get to see their ongoing usages, pricing and billing information including invoices right within their Azure Stack customer portal at a quick glance.

  • Ability to see their ongoing usages and its associated costs
  • Automatic invoice generation at the end of the billing cycle
  • Pay your bills within the Azure Stack Hub portal
  • Native billing experience just like Azure
Learn more on Tenant Features Watch Demo


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Essential Features of the Billing Solution

Custom Pricing Profiles

  • Ability to configure different pricing for the usage meters emitted by the Azure Stack services
  • Bill-back customers in the following models: Fixed Fee, Pay-as-you-go and Combinations of both models with compatible rates

Offer Promotional Credits

  • Run various types of promotional credits to your customers like One-time, Recurring, Individual User Credits, etc., for increasing their life time value and stickiness
  • Credits can be given in a percentage or a monetary value to customers

Usage Histories & Invoices

  • Ability for the admin and tenant to see the historic and current month usage details and its associated costs
  • Cost comparison with previous months and provide cost trend analysis report along with the Invoices

Custom Collector

  • It is a wonderful mechanism that augments collecting more usage data that are not available in the usage collection mechanism of Azure Stack Hub provided by Microsoft
  • On top of this you can bill your customers based on their specific billing needs

Quota vs Usage Consumption

  • A quick comparison view of the allocated Azure Stack Quota vs Usage Consumption for all the registered Tenant users
  • Powerful trend chart view across the consumed Azure Stack resources and the monthly summary report can be downloaded as a CSV file

CSP Reseller Billing

  • Profit visibility for selling license, usage and service based subscriptions
  • System generated invoices supports multi-currency and multi-languages
  • Invoice can be segregated based on licenses, usages, etc.,

Azure Stack Hub Billing Resources

Datasheet

Customer case studies on leveraging Cloud Assert Usage and Billing Resource Provider in their Azure Stack Hub journey

Download Datasheet

Azure Marketplace

Explore the seamless native billing experience for Azure Stack Hub and simplify the way to show/ chargeback your customers on real-time

Go to Azure Marketplace


Are you looking for usage and billing Azure Stack Hub

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Being an Azure Stack Hub Evangelist | Jayanth Dattatri talks about Cloud Assert Solutions

In this video, Mr. Jayanth, the Senior Principal Engineer Product Technologist for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, working for Dell Technologies talks about Cloud Assert Billing solution and Dell's association with Cloud Assert.



A Leader in Hybrid Cloud Management Since 2014

Cloud Assert has been trusted by Fortune 100 Companies as a Leader in Hybrid Cloud Management, Cost Management and Billing since 2014.

Cloud Assert work closely with Microsoft teams and our customers in building Hybr VConnect and Billing solutions to complement Microsoft Azure Stack adoption and to deliver a powerful hybrid cloud platform.

We're glad that customers can now take advantage of all the great features of Azure Stack without impacting existing infrastructure investments

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Ravi C Kolandaiswamy CEO & Founder

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Recent Blogs

Stay ahead with Usage and Billing v2.1.8.34 for Microsoft Azure Stack

Explore Cloud Assert blogs, YouTube channel and social media pages to know more about the latest updates.

Author: Arun Krishnan/Wednesday, July 3, 2019/Categories: Microsoft Azure Stack, Products, Usage and Billing

Rate this article:
5.0

We are pleased to announce the release of Usage and Billing v2.1.8.34 for Microsoft Azure Stack to General Availability. 

What's New?

  1. Supports Microsoft Azure Stack Version 1905:
    • The Deployment scripts for the Cloud Assert Billing solution is now compatible with Azure Stack PowerShell version 1.7.2.
    • Cloud Assert Billing resource provider for Microsoft Azure Stack was tested against 1905 version.

  2. Daily cost trend for user’s subscriptions:
    • In the Tenant portal, the cost trend for each subscription of the user can be seen.
    • The cost trend can be seen for previous billing cycles as well.

  3. Configure Budgets for user’s subscriptions:
    • Tenants can set budgets for each subscription they own and set thresholds (say like 90% reach) to trigger a kind of warning alerts.
    • Warning alerts can be sent via email and it could be seen in the Tenant portal as well.

Known Issues:

  1. The CSP customer profile will be created before the administrator approves.
  2. The admin approval for a created customer profile is needed for the tenants to purchase CSP offers/licenses.
  3. Only 200 metered pricing will be displayed/ listed when a pricing profile is opened.

Installers:



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Upgrade Notes: 
Updating Billing API and Agent Service
Pre-uninstall Steps

  • Take a backup of Cloud Assert billing database.
  • Take a backup of the following files from their respective locations.

File Name

File Path

Web.config

C:\inetpub\MgmtSvc-CloudAssertBilling

License.cal

C:\inetpub\MgmtSvc-CloudAssertBilling\bin

CloudAssert.WAP.Billing.AgentService.exe.config

C:\Program Files\CloudAssertBilling\CloudAssert.WAP.Billing.AgentService

 
Uninstallation Steps

  • Uninstall existing Usage and Billing installers from Add or Remove Programs on the resource provider machine.
  • Delete ‘CloudAssertBilling’ from ‘C:\Program Files’ if it presents after uninstalling Billing Agent Service setup.

Installation Steps

  • Copy the initialize.ini file from the following location ‘C:\Packages\Plugins\Microsoft.Powershell.DSC\2.19.0.0\DSCWork\setupBillingConfiguration.0\AzureStack.Billing.Setup.1.0.0\content\Setup\Packages’.
  • Place ‘setup.bat’ and ‘initialize.ini’ (which are acquired from the above steps) files in the folder where the billing installers have been extracted.

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Installing Billing API Service

  • Open a command prompt as administrator.
  • Navigate to the billing installers folder.
  • Run ‘setup.bat install-api’.

Installing Billing Agent Service

  • Refresh the admin/tenant portal and verify that Billing extension is working fine.
  • Open a command prompt as administrator.
  • Navigate to the billing installers folder.
  • Run ‘setup.bat install-agent’.

Post Installation Steps

  • Download the Billing tool and extract it.
  • Open a command prompt as administrator.
  • Navigate to the billing tool folder.
  • Run the ‘UpdateDatabase’ command in BillingTool.exe as below (the API endpoint, user name and password can be found from ‘initialize.ini’ file which is mentioned in Installation Steps),


Updating Resource Provider Components
Pre-Uninstall Steps

  • Take a backup of the following files from their respective locations.

File Name

File Path

web.config

C:\inetpub\AzureStack-BillingAdminExtension

web.config

C:\inetpub\AzureStack-BillingTenantExtension

Web.config

C:\inetpub\AzureStack-BillingRP

 

Installing Billing Admin Extension

  • Download and extract the admin extension.
  • In the command prompt, change the directory to the AdminExtension folder.
  • Run the command “CloudAssert.AzureStack.Billing.AdminExtension.deploy.cmd /y”.
  • Open the web.config file from ‘C:\inetpub\AzureStack-BillingAdminExtension’.
  • Replace the <appSettings> section from the corresponding backup file.

Installing Billing Tenant Extension

  • Download and extract tenant extension.
  • In the command prompt, change the directory to the TenantExtension folder.
  • Run the command “CloudAssert.AzureStack.Billing.TenantExtension.deploy.cmd /y”.
  • Open the web.config file from ‘C:\inetpub\AzureStack- AzureStack-BillingTenantExtension’.
  • Replace the <appSettings> section from the corresponding backup file.

Installing Billing Resource Provider

  • Download and extract resource provider.
  • In the command prompt, change the directory to the RP folder.
  • Run the command “CloudAssert.MAS.Billing.ResourceProvider.deploy.cmd /y”.
  • Open the web.config file from ‘C:\inetpub\AzureStack-BillingRP’.
  • Replace the <appSettings> section from the corresponding backup file.
  • Ensure that the following two app settings are present in the config file after replacing the old app settings. Incase it is not available; copy paste the below two lines inside the <appSettings> section.

<add key="BillingRp.AdminTrustedCertificateThumbPrint" value="AdminThumbPrint1, AdminThumbPrint2" />

<add key="BillingRp.TenantTrustedCertificateThumbPrint" value="TenantThumbPrint1, TenantThumbPrint1" />



If you face any issues during the installation please reach us at support@cloudassert.com

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Tags: Usage and Billing Azure Stack Cost Management

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