A budget will give the ability to your resellers and direct customers to setup a threshold for the consumption of each of their Azure Plan subscription(s). With budgets, they can view If the current cost of their Azure Plan subscription is reaching close to the cost budget they defined. This functionality is available only to your customers and resellers via your Storefront.

Define a Budget Alert

Your resellers and your customers are able to define a recurring budget alert from the details page of their Azure Plan subscription.  Your resellers and your customers are able to create a budget alert based on the cost for their Azure Plan, after all taxes(if applicable) are applied. For creating a new Budget alert on an Azure Plan the users should define the name of the Budget, the Budget Threshold, and the preferred alerts. After the users create the Budget, they are able to examine it on the Azure Plan subscription view on Storefront. They are also able to edit it and delete it. This option is available only for active, suspended or pending for cancellation subscriptions.

By selecting the "New Budget Alert" action, the budget alert pop-up will be displayed for your reseller or customer to define the threshold he wants.

• Budget Name: A memorable description for this alert.
• Budget Scope: This is a locked drop-down field, displaying the Azure Plan's name.
• Budget Type: This is a locked drop-down field, displaying the value Recurring as the default one. In later versions, more options will follow.
• Based On: This is a locked drop-down field, displaying the value Cost as the default one. In later versions, more options will follow.
• Budget Threshold: This field is for your reseller or customer to define the threshold he wants for the specific Azure Plan subscription. This field must be a positive number above the current consumption of the subscription.
• Alerts: In this section, your customer or reseller can define which notifications will be sent and to whom.  For each alert he should define:
  • Recipient(s): A list of emails. When you create a new alert, the system pre-fills this field with the recipients of the previous alert.
  • % of Budget and Amount. You can define a value only for one of these two fields, since by setting a value for one of the fields our system will calculate automatically the value for the second field using the budget threshold. 
    • % of Budget: It can be an integer between 1 -100. Any value below 1 will be replaced with 1 and any value above 100 will be replaced with 100. 
    • Amount: It can be any positive decimal number below the budget threshold. 

If your reseller or customer wishes to Add another Alert for that budget, he can do so by clicking on the "Add another alert" button, found inside the budget. Otherwise, they can choose to edit an existing budget alert and in there, click on the  "Add another alert" button.
After saving the "New Budget Alert" pop-up window, the newly established Budget Alert will be displayed in the Azure Plan subscription view, like this:

Alerts Dispatching

The consumption of the Azure Plan subscription(s) is updated on a daily basis using the "Partner Center" API. After the completion of the consumption update, our system checks if there are alerts that must be dispatched and it sends these alerts using the system notification "Budget Alert for Azure Service". 

• The alert will be sent to the recipient(s) the customer or reseller defined but also to the email(s) you will define in the "To" field of the notification.
• For dispatching the alert, we check the alert amount against subscription's total amount excluding any add-on charges. 
• Each alert will be sent only once per billing cycle, unless the customer changes the alert's properties. When an alert is sent, its status changes to "fulfilled".
• If after the consumption update there are more than one alerts that must be sent for the same subscription, the system will send all alerts.

Editing a Budget Alert

Your reseller or customer can change the budget alert properties from the Azure Plan subscription details page. 

The "Edit Budget Alert" action is only available for active Azure Plan subscriptions. 

Changing the Budget Threshold

If your reseller or customer changes the threshold, our system will automatically recalculate the alert amounts and all alerts will be marked again as active, meaning that at the next consumption update the system will check these alerts if they must be sent.

Changing the Percentage / Amount of an Alert

The customer can change the "% of budget" or "amount" property of an alert that has been already sent for the current billing cycle. In this case, the system will mark the alert again as active, meaning that at the next consumption update the system will check if this alert must be re-sent or not.
The new value for the amount must be greater than the current consumption otherwise, the system will not accept the value. 

Viewing your Customers Budget Alerts from BSS

In BSS, you can view your resellers' and customers' budget alerts on Azure Plan subscription details page. When an Azure Plan subscription has a budget alert, we display it in the "Budget Alerts" tab.