Connecting to Azure

Connect your Azure accounts to CloudZero to bring your Azure cost data into a unified view of all your cloud spend. CloudZero organizes your Azure costs, along with your other cloud costs, into categories (called Dimensions) that matter most to your business. For example: business unit, team, product, feature, environment, customer, or virtually anything else. Once connected and organized, you can quickly answer questions about your cloud spend that matter to your stakeholders.

Azure connections use a read-only service principal in your Azure tenant. CloudZero supports four Azure agreement types and can detect yours for you during setup.

Connect to your Azure account

You don't need to choose your agreement type in CloudZero. The Azure Agreement Type field defaults to Auto-detect, and CloudZero identifies the type from the billing account ID or subscription ID you enter. The setup guides differ in the IDs you collect and the read-only role you grant in Azure, so follow the guide for your agreement type:

• Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA)
• Enterprise Agreement (EA)
• Cloud Solution Provider (CSP)
• Microsoft Partner Agreement (MPA): to connect a subscription bought through a partner, follow the CSP guide. Azure reports these subscriptions as MPA, so CloudZero lists them as Microsoft Partner Agreement. To connect an MPA billing account directly, contact your account manager.

Find your agreement type

If you're not sure which guide to follow, check your agreement type in Azure:

1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
2. Open Cost Management + Billing from the search bar or the left navigation.
3. If you have access to only one billing scope, select Properties from the left navigation. The Type value on the Properties pane shows your agreement type.
4. If you have access to multiple billing scopes, select Billing scopes from the left navigation, and check the Billing account type column.

Then follow the matching guide:

If you bought your Azure subscription through a Microsoft partner (a Cloud Solution Provider), follow the CSP guide even if Azure shows one of the types above. For more ways to check, see Check the type of your account in the Azure documentation.

Unsupported agreement types

Accounts obtained through other agreements, such as the Microsoft Online Services Program (MOSP, also called pay-as-you-go) or other MSDN-based agreements, do not support exporting usage data and cannot be connected to CloudZero. If Auto-detect finds an agreement type CloudZero doesn't support, CloudZero shows the type Azure reported and doesn't complete the connection.

Change the agreement type

Until CloudZero first ingests data from a connection, you can change its agreement type. Selecting Auto-detect runs detection again. Go to Settings > Connections, select the connection, select Edit, choose a new Azure Agreement Type, and select Save Changes.

After the first successful data ingest, the agreement type is locked. If your Azure agreement has changed, contact your account manager.

Next steps

Once your billing connection is active, you can also connect resource metadata for deeper cost analysis.

What Azure reports for credits and adjustments differs by agreement type. For what to expect from each, see Azure credits and adjustments.