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Azure EA

Introduction​

When deploying the Azure EA Extraction template for Exivity, some configuration is required within your Azure EA environment. The following process must be completed in order to report on Azure EA consumption:

  1. Create an Access Key and Secret in your Azure EA portal
  2. Configure the Azure EA Extractor and Workflow
  3. Configure the Azure EA Transformers and Workflow
  4. Execute the workflows
  5. Create a Report definition

Creating an Access Key & Secret​

For Exivity to authenticate with Azure EA Cost Management, you will need to create an access key and secret in the Azure Cost Management Portal. More details on how to create this application, can be found on the Microsoft documentation here. The following information will be required in order to configure the Exivity data pipeline:

  1. Cost Management API Key & Secret
  2. The Azure Tenant GUID used to create the Cost Management API Key & Secret
  3. The Azure EA Enrollment ID of your organisation

After you have obtained all the necessary requirements, you are ready to create the Extractor.

Configure Extractor​

To create the Extractor, browse to Data Sources > Extractors in the Exivity GUI. Then follow these steps to create the Extractor:

  • Select the Azure Cost Management template from the drop-down list
  • Provide a name for the Extractor in the Name field
  • Click the Create button.

Once you've created the Extractor, go to the first tab: Variables tab and apply your configuration settings:

Fill in all variables in the above screenshot and feel free to encrypt any sensitive data using the lock symbol on the right. There are three options for getting data from the Azure API based on:

  • enrollment
  • billing_account
  • subscription For Azure EA, we recommend using the billing_account approach. Additional information can be obtained from the Azure EA API documentation.

After filling in your settings, click the Update button to save your changes.

Configure Transformers​

Next two Transformers will need to be created. To create these Transformers, browse to Data Sources > Transformers in the Exivity GUI and select the Azure EA > Azure EA Converter from the Template drop-down list, then click the Create:

Repeat the same steps for the Azure EA Transformer:

Creating the Workflows​

It will now be required to create two workflows: one that will obtain the Azure EA billing data, and then converts it to processable CSV data which can be used by the Azure Transformer. Therefore a second Workflow also needs to be created for the Azure EA Transformer. To create these Workflows, browse to Data Sources > Workflows in the Exivity GUI and provide a meaningful name for the first Workflow. Then add two steps,. First he Azure EA Extractor with a Start offset of -1 an End offset of 0 and a timeout of 3 hours:

Then secondly create the Azure EA Converter step using the following settings:

Then create the workflow and execute it for a date in the month where you want to extract the Azure EA billing data for by selecting a date and then pressing the Run Now button.**

When executing the workflow, you can view the Status tab in the Workflow screen to verify the progress. When the dropped down list is showing an hour glass it means its still running. When its showing a checkbox, it means its completed successfully and when there is an exclamation mark it means something went wrong:

If this happened, you can click the job details and view any errors which should indicate what is wrong. This could be an invalid application GUID or secret, a wrong tenant ID, or you are using a combination of parameters which is not supported (this would happen typically if you are not an EA customer or you don't have enough permissions). If you need to make changes, this would need to be done inside the Azure EA Extractor configuration (typically the Variables tab).

After the workflow has finished successfully, you may create the Azure EA Transformer Workflow:

In this example, the data will be loaded with an Start/End offset of -1 day. Which means it will load a single day: the day before the date of execution. This means if you execute the workflow for May 1st, it will load the data for April 30th. This is useful when creating a Schedule for the Workflow later: typically availability of Azure EA billing data is 1 or 2 days late. Hence its important to consider this when executing your workflows at specific intervals.

After clicking Create, execute the workflow for your preferred date:

Check the Status tab

Create a Report​

Once you have run both workflows successfully, create a Report Definition via the menu option Reports > Definitions:

After selecting the azure.ea dataset from the Dataset dropdown list, select the column by which you would like to break down the Azure costs. Typically this would be the ones shown above. Provide a meaningful name Once you have created the report, you should then click the Prepare Report button after first making sure you have selected a valid date range from the date selector shown when preparing the report.

You can monitor the progress of the Prepare Report process using the Status menu in the upper right corner of the screen:

Once this is done you should be able to run any of Accounts, Instances, Services or Summary report types located under the Report menu for the date range you prepared the report for.