Vantage Launches Microsoft Azure Cost Support

by Vantage Team


Vantage and Azure

Today, Vantage announces general availability for support of Microsoft Azure costs. Azure customers can now create a secure integration with Vantage to view, report on, forecast, and optimize their cloud costs. For users with workloads across Azure and other cloud providers, Vantage will integrate and show a unified view of cloud costs across providers.

Before, Vantage only supported AWS and GCP as infrastructure providers, in addition to service providers of Snowflake, Datadog, and Fastly. Customers with workloads running entirely on Azure were unable to use Vantage. Customers with workloads split across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure could only use Vantage to view their AWS and GCP costs.

All providers

Vantage supports six integrations with more on the way.

Now, organizations that are either “all-in” using Azure or operating in a multi-cloud fashion across AWS, GCP, and Azure can use Vantage to report, budget, forecast, and optimize cloud infrastructure costs. Newly registering Vantage users will be prompted to add Azure as an integration upon onboarding. Existing Vantage users can head to their integrations page to add their Azure accounts. In either case, customers will be provided with a simple set of copy-and-paste commands for brokering a secure, read-only connection which can be completed in a few minutes.

Azure support is available to all users across all tiers, including users in the free tier. If you’re an existing Vantage user, head to your account integrations page to add an integration with Azure. If you’re new to Vantage, register a free account and choose “Azure” as your provider for how to get onboarding instructions. For technical information about this integration, please refer to the Vantage documentation on Azure.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is being launched today?

Today, Vantage is launching general availability support for Microsoft Azure. This gives customers the ability to create a secure integration with Vantage to ingest, structure, visualize, and optimize Azure costs within the Vantage platform.

2. Who is the customer?

There are two different sets of customers for this:

  • Customers that are “all-in” on Azure Cloud. Customers who run development, test, and production workloads entirely on top of Azure Cloud can now register an account on Vantage and use the platform to manage their Azure Cloud costs.
  • Multi-cloud customers who have workloads across both AWS/GCP and Azure Cloud. Existing or new multi-cloud Azure customers now use Vantage as their single pane of glass interface to manage costs across different providers.

3. How much does this cost?

There is no additional cost to including Azure costs in Vantage. However, our same pricing and tier enforcement model remains: tiers will be enforced for the total amount of cloud costs tracked enforced off of the previous month’s accrued costs—which will be the entirety of all costs associated with any accounts connected.

4. How does Vantage technically integrate with Azure?

Vantage technically integrates by creating a “service principal” which is granted “Reader” role permissions at the Management Group or Subscription level. This enables Vantage to access cost data at the corresponding level. We recommend adding Vantage access to a management group that has subscriptions added to it. When subscriptions are added to this group Vantage will automatically begin importing costs for this subscription. Vantage does not have the ability to read from infrastructure such as databases or virtualized storage and can only view metadata about your infrastructure.

Once this access is granted, Vantage uses the Cost Management REST API to export Cost Details Reports for ingestion. Along with the Cost API Vantage will also access “List” APIs to import resource metadata.

5. Can Vantage make any changes to my Azure infrastructure?

No. Everything is read-only by default with the Azure Cloud integration. We collect billing information and various metadata about your infrastructure. We do not collect and store any personally identifiable information. You can read more about our integration in our documentation here.

6. I am a customer with existing providers connected to Vantage. What will change in my “Overview” experience?

There are a few things you will see differently in your “Overview” experience:

  • Azure will be added to the provider summary widget.
  • An additional widget will be added for a breakdown of Azure Subscriptions and their spend this month versus the previous month. This will be ordered in descending order and, dependent on the number of Subscriptions you have, there will be a devoted page to click through to see all subscriptions.
  • Your “All Resources” Cost Report will automatically include Azure and will see this represented in the Overview tab.

7. I am a customer who is only using Azure, what will my “Overview” experience look like?

Your Overview will have two widgets available:

  • Azure Subscription Cost Summary: You will be able to see a breakdown for each subscription in your Azure account of what the accrued cost is this month and last month for each Azure Subscription.
  • Cost Report Summaries: Cost Report summaries with a month-by-month breakdown of costs for your Azure account. As you create more Cost Reports with filters you define, you will have more of these Cost Reports appear on the Overview automatically.

8. How can I add an Azure integration to my Vantage account?

Visit your account’s integrations page and click Add next to the Azure Integrations section. This will give you a set of Azure CLI commands to run to connect your Azure account.

You can install the Azure CLI by following these instructions.

9. How long will it take for Vantage to sync data from my Azure account once I’ve made the integration?

The time it takes to sync your Azure data depends on the scale of your account. However, most accounts will import data in less than an hour. You will receive an email once your Azure cost data is finished importing.

10. What dimensions can I use when filtering Azure Costs?

  • Subscriptions
  • Resource Groups
  • Tags
  • Services
  • Service Usage Categories (i.e. VM type, transfer, etc. )
  • Region

11. I am a customer who is only using Azure, what will my “Savings Planner” experience look like?

Savings Planner is not currently supported for Azure.

12. Can I access data from Azure via the Vantage API?

Yes. All connected providers can be accessed through the Vantage API.

13. Can I receive data from Azure via Email, Slack, and Microsoft Teams integrations?

Yes. All connected providers are included in Cost Report Notifications.

14 Are anomalies detected for Azure data?

Yes, Anomalies will be detected at the category level and shown on Cost Reports which have Azure as a provider.

15. Will Autopilot support Azure workloads?

Autopilot is not yet supported. If you are interested in this support please contact support@vantage.sh

16. Are ‘Active Resources’ supported for Azure?

There is not currently Active Resource support for Azure, however, you can see costs by resource when viewing an Azure Cost Report. Active Resource support for Microsoft Azure is on the roadmap and if you’d like to opt into early access, please contact support@vantage.sh.

17. Does Vantage integrate with Active Directory for user management?

Yes, you can contact support@vantage.sh to enable an SSO integration with your Azure Active Directory.