How does the Azure Billing work? (old Azure Legacy Model)

This guide will describe the used billing model and invoices your will receive.

In contradiction to most services in the 2tCloud platform, the Azure CSP model is based on a pay-per-use model. You will not receive an invoice based on what you ordered. You can use all possible features of the product without a limit based on your subscription. Your actual usages of system resources is saved by Microsoft and send in batch increments to our 2tCloud platform. The billing and invoicing model is quite complex, so we try to explain it in this article.

The amount of billing parameters used for Microsoft Azure (CSP) is very large (5000+). Because of this reason we are forced to change the way invoices are generated for Azure subscriptions. We cannot specify every usage parameter on the invoice, but only show the "Total Cost of Azure Services" line item. This item will have a base value of 0,01 euro and will be added X amount of times to calculate the invoice total based on the usage report. The customer invoice will be billed over the period as defined in the monthly subscription "Microsoft Azure" on the customer account.

The reseller invoice will only show usage for the subscription "Azure CSP Reseller" that is active on your reseller account. This subscription has its own billing period that most likely differs from the customer invoice periods. The reseller invoice will only show one line item "Reseller Total Cost of Azure Services" that is build up in the same way as the end customer invoice. The Reseller Total Cost of Azure Services will add the total amount for all customers together in one line item, based on the billing period for the reseller subscription.

So you have to understand that the billing period differs between the customer and reseller invoice. This will cause a difference in the total amount you and your customer will have to pay on monthly basis (besides the margin you configured).

There are 2 disadvantages to that behavior.

We don't supply a line item per customers, all customer data is merged together.
The invoicing period for customer and reseller invoice differs, so you cannot compare the two.

Then we have a second factor that might influence your monthly invoice a bit. The usage report from Microsoft comes in with a delay of up to 72 hours. Once received we still need about 48 hours to process all the information and billing parameters between the customer and reseller subscription. If the monthly invoice is generated while we are waiting for the billing information from Microsoft, or we are in the process of adding a new billing information it might not be taken into the reseller and customer invoice at the same time. This delay might shift some of the last week’s usage report to the next invoice. This will explain that you might notice a higher reseller invoice than customer invoice for a month.

If you want to see what the actual usage data shows you can login to the end user control panel. In the right top corner of the customer panel you can select the "Microsoft Azure" subscription. Once this is selected a new tab shows named "Microsoft Azure", please open this tab, and browse to sub-tab "Usage Report”.

You can add a date range in American format to filter the usage report from Microsoft for the given period that is on the customer invoice. Than you can directly view the usage parameters and are able to download the report in CSV format to further process it yourself.