Charge back Azure Reservation costs

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Enterprise Agreement and Microsoft Customer Agreement billing readers can view amortized cost data for reservations. They can use the cost data to charge back the monetary value for a subscription, resource group, resource, or a tag to their partners. In amortized data, the effective price is the prorated hourly reservation cost. The cost is the total cost of reservation usage by the resource on that day.

Users with an individual subscription can get the amortized cost data from their usage file. When a resource gets a reservation discount, the AdditionalInfo section in the usage file contains the reservation details. For more information, see View and download your Azure usage and charges.

See reservation usage data for show back and charge back

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
  2. Navigate to Cost Management + Billing.
  3. Select Cost analysis from left navigation.
  4. Under Actual Cost, select the Amortized Cost metric.
  5. To see which resources were used by a reservation, apply a filter for Reservation and then select reservations.
  6. Set the Granularity to Monthly or Daily.
  7. Set the chart type to Table.
  8. Set the Group by option to Resource.

Screenshot showing reservation resource costs that you can use for chargeback.

Get the data for show back and charge back

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
  2. Navigate to Cost Management + Billing.
  3. Select Export from left navigation.
  4. Select Add.
  5. Select Amortized cost as the metric button and setup your export.

The EffectivePrice for the usage that gets reservation discount is the prorated cost of the reservation (instead of being zero). This helps you know the monetary value of reservation consumption by a subscription, resource group or a resource, and can help you charge back for the reservation utilization internally. The dataset also has unused reservation hours.

Get Azure consumption and reservation usage data using API

You can get the data using the API or download it from Azure portal.

You call the Usage Details API to get the new data. For details about terminology, see usage terms.

Here's an example call to the Usage Details API:

https://management.chinacloudapi.cn/providers/Microsoft.Billing/billingAccounts/{enrollmentId}/providers/Microsoft.Billing/billingPeriods/{billingPeriodId}/providers/Microsoft.Consumption/usagedetails?metric={metric}&api-version=2019-05-01&$filter={filter}

For more information about {enrollmentId} and {billingPeriodId}, see the Usage Details – List API article.

Information in the following table about metric and filter can help solve for common reservation problems.

Type of API data API call action
All Charges (usage and purchases) Replace {metric} with ActualCost
Usage that got reservation discount Replace {metric} with ActualCost

Replace {filter} with: properties/reservationId%20ne%20
Usage that didn't get reservation discount Replace {metric} with ActualCost

Replace {filter} with: properties/reservationId%20eq%20
Amortized charges (usage and purchases) Replace {metric} with AmortizedCost
Unused reservation report Replace {metric} with AmortizedCost

Replace {filter} with: properties/ChargeType%20eq%20'UnusedReservation'
Reservation purchases Replace {metric} with ActualCost

Replace {filter} with: properties/ChargeType%20eq%20'Purchase'
Refunds Replace {metric} with ActualCost

Replace {filter} with: properties/ChargeType%20eq%20'Refund'

Download the usage CSV file with new data

If you're an EA admin, you can download the CSV file that contains new usage data from Azure portal.

In the Azure portal, navigate to Cost management + billing.

  1. Select the billing account.
  2. Select Usage + charges.
  3. Select Download.
    Screenshot showing where to Download the CSV usage data file in the Azure portal.
  4. In Usage Details, select Amortized usage data.

The CSV files that you download contain actual costs and amortized costs.

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