Managing Azure CSP Partnerships and Customers
Note:
Azure CSP subscriptions can be visualized and reported on in Flexera One like other subscriptions, but there are some important differences in the costs and setup that you need be aware of.
Flexera One integrates with the Microsoft Partner APIs to provide functionality around the CSP program. Each of your customers within the partner portal should have their own organization created in Flexera One to contain their information and access controls.
As Microsoft does not provide granular cost information for subscriptions that are part of the CSP program, Flexera One leverages the utilization APIs for CSP subscriptions and combines the usage information with the Pay-as-you-Go pricing from Azure to generate cost information for CSP subscriptions. The following sections provide detailed instructions about how to achieve that.
| 1. | Initial Setup |
| 2. | Enabling your customers in Flexera One |
| 3. | Managing customer tenants |
| 4. | Generating CSP customer cost data |
Important:The following limitations apply in Flexera One regarding CSP subscription. Apart from these limitations, all other functions are equivalent to Azure EA and other public clouds.
| • | Only Azure Pay-As-You-Go pricing in USD is supported. |
| • | Azure reservations and savings plan purchases are not shown in Cloud Cost Optimization. |
| • | Discounted usage from the use of reservations and savings plans is not supported. In other words, all costs are generated at the public rate. |
| • | The List Price, Savings and Savings Percentage metrics are not available. The Rate Reduction Savings dashboard does not show savings. |
As a Microsoft CSP, you must first register your CSP partnership with Flexera so that the platform can offer you the customer management capabilities associated with CSP. Once you have registered your partner information, you can select which of your customers in CSP you would like to enable in Flexera One.
This registration needs to be performed only one time per partnership (not per CSP customer) and should be performed on the Flexera One organization that is affiliated with your company (not with your customer). Multiple partnerships can be registered with your organization.
To begin a partnership with Flexera, visit Flexera Partners.
Note:Partner portal API keys are set to expire in 6 months by default. Make sure to set a reminder to rotate the keys in both Microsoft and Flexera One to ensure service continuity.
Enabling your customers in Flexera One
Once your partnership has been registered, you can enable your customers in Flexera One by completing the following tasks:
| 1. | Creating a Flexera One organization for the customer |
| 2. | Associating a customer tenant to the Flexera One organization |
| 3. | Granting customers access to their Flexera One organization |
Creating a Flexera One organization for the customer
To create a Flexera One organization for partner customers, use the MSPCustomer API in https://developer.flexera.com and meet the following requirements:
| • | The parent organization must have the ‘msp’ capability. |
| • | The user creating the organization must have the Manage MSP Customers role. |
Associating a customer tenant to the Flexera One organization
Important:To perform this step, you must have the Manage MSP Customers role in both your organization and the customer’s organization. For complete descriptions of each role available in Flexera One, see Flexera One Roles.
Once the organization has been created for a customer, you can associate the tenant from your partner portal with the organization. This action will associate all of the subscriptions in the customer tenant with the given organization in Flexera One. There will be no indication in the customer organization that their CSP data is connected as this information is only available in your organization that has the CSP partnership registered.
Multiple customer tenants can be registered to the same organization; however, this should only be done if those tenants represent the same customer.
Note:If the CSP subscription was transferred into your CSP from another CSP, data will only be available from the transfer date forward.
To associate a customer tenant to the Flexera One organization:
| 1. | In the Microsoft Partner Portal, go to the Azure Partner Center dashboard, select Customers, and click the menu-down arrow on the right to expose the Microsoft ID. You will need to input this ID as the Customer Tenant ID in Flexera One in the next step. |
| 2. | Register the customer tenant in Flexera One by using either of the following approach: |
| • | UI Registration: |
| 1. | In the Flexera One parent organization, go to Administration > Cloud Settings > Billing Configuration. |
| 2. | On the list of bill connections, select the CSP partnership that the customer belongs to. |
| 3. | Click the Tenants tab. |
| 4. | Click the Edit Tenants. |
| 5. | Click the Add Tenant. |
| 6. | Input the Customer Tenant ID that you obtained from the Microsoft Partner Portal. |
| 7. | Select the organization to associate the billing data to. |
| 8. | Click Update. |
| • | API Registration: |
| 1. | Use the Create call on the AzureCSPCustomers resource in the Cost Management API with the Customer Tenant ID and Organization ID in the body as specified. The Customer Tenant ID is the ID that you obtained from the Microsoft Partner Portal. |
| 2. | Wait up to 24 hours for data to be populated in Flexera One. All subscriptions will be populated with data from as far back as there was utilization for the subscription. |
Granting customers access to their Flexera One organization
Once you have verified that data is being populated in the organization, you can begin inviting customer users to the organization so that they can see their cost data in Flexera One.
Once you have registered your CSP customer tenants, you can use either the UI or API to manage configurations.
To manage customer tenants in the Flexera One UI:
| 1. | Go to Administration > Cloud Settings > Billing Configuration. |
| 2. | On the list of bill connections, select the CSP partnership that the customer belongs to. |
| 3. | Click the Tenants tab. |
You can see all the customer tenants that have been configured and the organizations they are associated with.
| 4. | If you want to update information, add new tenants, or remove associations, click Edit Tenants. After you make the changes, click Update. |
To manage customer tenants by using the API:
Use the AzureCSPCustomers resource in the Cost Management API. The AzureCSPCustomers resource represents each customer tenant that you have registered with an organization in Flexera One from your CSP partnership.
| • | To get a list of all customer tenants that are registered with Flexera One organizations, use the Index action. |
| • | To get details for an individual customer tenant, use the Get action. |
| • | To remove a customer's subscriptions from an organization, use the Delete action. |
Generating CSP customer cost data
Once a customer has been configured, Flexera One will begin generating cost information for that customer's subscriptions by combining the customer's subscription utilization records (which contains detailed usage information) with the Azure Pay-as-you-Go prices in USD. The resulting costs are shown in Flexera One and can be analyzed like other bill-based costs.
Historical data generation
Flexera One will generate historical data for as much data is available through the utilization records API in Azure.
Price sheets
Currently, only the Pay-As-You-Go prices in USD are supported.
Billing periods
Currently, the cost calculations use the calendar month as the start and end of the billing period. This has implications on how some of the costs are calculated and how reconciliation with the Azure bill can be done.
Tiered costs
For some costs in Azure, tiered costs apply, where higher usage of a given resource within a given time frame causes the cost to decrease in a tiered fashion. For example, storage in Azure uses a tiered pricing model.
When Flexera One calculates cost, it also incorporates these tiers, but the usage is calculated using the billing period in effect, which is currently only calendar month. This can cause some differences with the actual prices charged as the tiers in Azure apply to the billing period in effect with Azure.
Azure CSP reservations and savings plans
Currently, Azure CSP reservations and savings plans are not supported in Flexera One. Neither the purchase of Azure reservations and savings plans nor the discounts that they effect will be incorporated into the CSP subscription cost data.
Reconciliation with Azure bills
In many cases, your staff may want to reconcile the data being provided to your customers via Flexera One with the bills provided by Azure to your organization. When performing this reconciliation, there are two primary differences that must be considered:
| • | Flexera One billing periods are calendar month only, so your staff will need to use daily data from Flexera One and cut the data to whatever period is used by your organization with Microsoft. |
| • | Flexera One uses the Pay-as-you-Go pricing to generate cost information, while your bills are generated using CSP pricing. |