Table of Contents

Initial Setup

Step 1: Activate Your Account

Step 2: Access Billing Accounts

Step 3: Subscription Account with Resources (Optional)

Step 4: Manage Users and Permissions

Cost Reports for Azure

Step 5: Azure Billing – Dashboard

Step 6: Azure Billing – Summary Reports

Step 7: Azure Billing – Custom Reporting

Step 8: Spend Analysis

Step 9: Azure Partner Tools

CloudCheckr Training Links

INITIAL SETUP

Step 1: Activate Your Account

From the Ingram Micro Onboarding Process, an Activation Email will be sent to you.

Open your email and click Activate Account

Set your new password

4. Sign-off and log back on to verify your credential and password.

CloudCheckr has a platform deployed in three regions. Direct your web browser to one of the following links depending on your country and log-on using your CloudCheckr credentials: app.cloudcheckr.com | eu.cloudcheckr.com | au.cloudcheckr.com

Step 2: Access Billing Accounts (Reseller and Customer)

Most of our resellers and partners require access to a Cloud Cost Management and Optimization Platform. With CloudCheckr, we provide our resellers access to billing, resource usage, best practices, optimization, etc. In CloudCheckr, we can apply the markups offered to resellers based on current Cloud Market Place (CMP) rates. Also, additional features such as invoicing, additional custom charges by resellers can be provided.

Your Billing Accounts are created and configured by Ingram Micro to bring all your end customers subscriptions under your Billing Account.

Launch CloudCheckr > Select Azure.

The main page of CloudCheckr should display your Billing Account and your Customer Subscription (billing only) child accounts.

Step 3: Subscription Accounts (with Resources) - Optional

For CloudCheckr to fully monitor your Azure deployment, you have two account types to the platform. The first is CSP Billing Only account, which will provide cost data, and this is the Reseller and Customer Billing Account provided by Ingram Micro as shown above.

The second type of accounts will be your Subscription account(s) with resources; the subscription account is an individual account that collects resources if you have Azure Active Directory setup, and will provide you with best practices, inventory, security, and utilization modules in CloudCheckr. This type of account will be created by you.

In order to collect resource information for an Azure Subscription, you must configure the appropriate settings in the Azure portal and then provide the Directory ID, Application ID, Subscription ID, and Secret Key in the Account Configuration menu in CloudCheckr.

For detailed information on how to perform these steps, see Microsoft Azure Configuration – Subscriptions.

Step 4: Create Users and Permissions

Ingram Micro Resellers have full control over provisioning and managing user access within their account(s). User access can be configured with specific permissions, rights, and visibility based on the needs and role of the user.

Click on Settings icon and select Partner / Account > Users (This link is visible only to administrator users)

7. Click on New User

8. Type the email address of the user you wish to add and select one of the Roles for the user

For your end customer user, you can grant permission based on subscription. Then Click on Create.

For detailed information on how to perform these steps, see CloudCheckr Success Center: User Management

COST REPORTS FOR AZURE

CloudCheckr offers a variety of cost-based reports. CloudCheckr's cost reports will show you how much you are paying for your Azure architecture but they also highlight areas where costs could be better optimized. Billing reports will show your current Azure invoice, how much you have spent on each service, and provide a billing history.

Step 5: Azure Billing - Dashboard

Click and open your Billing Account. Select Cost > Azure Billing > Dashboard

Dashboards provide quick, distilled views of data related to your cloud cost, inventory, utilization, and saved filters. You can choose from more than 30 built-in dashboard panes that you can add to your dashboard view and customize.

This guide will show you how to create dashboards and add and configure panes within a dashboard.

For detailed information on how to perform these steps, see Create Dashboards.

Step 6: Azure Billing – Summary Reports

Billing Consolidated Summary Reports

Consolidated Billing Summary Report shows you daily and month-to-date cost for each of the subscriptions within your Azure Enterprise Agreement or Cloud Solution Provider. The totals for this report are taken directly from your Azure usage reports.

Single Day & Monthly Summary Reports

The Single Day and Month Billing Summary Reports show you statistics for a specific date or month on your bill taken directly from your Azure invoice.

Step 7: Azure Billing – Custom Reporting

Advanced Grouping Report

CloudCheckr's Advanced Grouping report is a powerful tool that gives you total flexibility over the cost data in your Azure Detailed Billing Report.

Advanced Grouping allows you to easily pivot your data and costs by multiple levels of Subscription criteria, such as Account, Resource ID, Service, and Tag Keys. For instance, you can group costs by Tag Keys of CustomerName, then further group costs within that by Tag Keys of ProductName. You can create reports of up to five levels of groupings with Tag Keys.

Cost Changes Reports

The Billing Cost Changes report is designed to allow CloudCheckr users to quickly identify cost fluctuations between two separate billing periods.

The Billing Cost Changes report is based on cost data obtained from the Azure Detailed Billing Report. When viewing this report within a consolidated payer account inside CloudCheckr you will have the ability to view cost changes across the entire consolidated bill, or for specific payee accounts. When viewing this report within a payee account, you will only be able to see cost changes for that account's usage.

Step 8: Spend Analysis

Spend Analysis reports take information extracted from your Detailed Billing Reports and aggregate it for any time period specified. Summary and Detail reports illustrate all the costs associated with a particular service, while Static Reports take a snapshot of your service deployment and history in order to make an estimate of future usage.

Step 9: Azure Partner Tools

Azure Partner Tools are available in the Enterprise Agreement or Cloud Solution Provider accounts. They help manage complex billing ecosystems. You can create and schedule invoices, determine how reservations are handled, create custom charges and usage rates, and reload usage reports.

List Cost Analysis

Determining List Cost requires a series of complex calculations that can be very difficult to resolve. This report is designed to show you each cost that was changed by CloudCheckr to come up with the List Cost. This report can be used to validate the changes made to determine List Cost.

Custom Charges

Custom Charges allows you to add custom charges into CloudCheckr to ensure your invoices and chargebacks and accurate.

Custom Usage Rates

CloudCheckr allows you to override the usage rates set by Azure. When you set a new rate up with the given filters, CloudCheckr uses those values to calculate a new List Cost of the charge. These changes will not affect the standard cost shown in CloudCheckr, but will only affect the List Cost.

Generate Invoices

The Azure Invoice Generator is designed to allow you to create, and print invoices to your customers and clients based on their Azure usage. This report gives you the flexibility to show different pricing models and makes it easy for resellers and managed service providers to streamline their billing process.

Reload Usage Reports

You will need to reload a billing period's data whenever you make changes to the billing data (such as adding a custom charge). The fastest way to kick off a reload is to click 'Reload' for the month in question, then click 'Run Billing Update Now'. Once the reload is complete, the Process State will say 'Processed' and the Last Processed date will be recent.

Subscription Families

CloudCheckr enables you to group one or more subscriptions into a Subscription Family. This grouping allows you to invoice and report on multiple subscriptions for a single customer. As well, this grouping can be used to limit access and limit visibility for an end user to only their own subscriptions.

You can also use Subscription Families to apply custom charges, discounts, and usage rates to specific customers.

Within the account you setup in CloudCheckr for the Azure Enterprise Agreement or the CSP, you can configure these Subscription Families. Name your Subscription Family and then select the subscriptions that should be treated as a single set of subscriptions.

Customers created in Subscription Families will carry through to the Invoice Generator.