Month: May 2015

Subscription based permissions in Azure Cost Monitor

de Azure Cost Monitor , , ,

The Azure Cost Monitor Team is excited to announce the launch of the new “subscription based permissions – feature”, starting today.
When it comes to ensuring effective cloud use at your company, nothing will help you make better decisions than the right, relevant data. With this new feature, adressing specific ressources to each department has never been easier.
This great feature also makes it very easy for Service Providers to give their customers transparency about their subscription based spendings.

How to get started?

Starting with the new feature in the Azure Cost Monitor is this simple:

1. Upgrade your account to a team account:

team-02-migrate-team

2. Invite co workers to your team:

team-04-add-user-modal

3. Assign subscription based permissions:

select-subscriptions

Interested in the “subscription based permission – feature”?

The new feature brings structure to all of your subscriptions in the Azure Cost Monitor and makes cloud cost management easy and comfortable.

Try the new feature today by simply logging into your Azure Cost Monitor enterprise account. If you don’t have an enterprise subscription, try it for free for a certain time, as we are currently in the technical preview phase.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

Azure App Services: Restart your node-WebJobs during GitDeploy

de Tutorials , , ,

With Azure App Services (aka. Azure WebSites), the Microsoft Azure cloud offers a great, highly scalable and simple way to host cloud and SaaS services. Besides ASP.NET, several other platforms and languages are supported, e.g. node.js, Python or Java. I personally prefer hosting services written in node.js on this nice managed service of Microsoft.

A common problem for web-services are background jobs like e.g. sending out e-mails or calculating some sales numbers once a day. This use-case can be addressed with Azure WebJobs which are running on the same instance as the web service itself. Jamie Espinosa described the behaviour of WebJobs on an Azure Friday very well. Azure Friday is BTW hosting a whole series about Azure WebJobs, so check it out to get more information.

Normally when deploying a web service into the Azure WebSite the associated WebJobs will be restarted out of the box. A special thing of node.js based Azure WebJobs is that only when the run.js file is changed the WebJob will be restarted. This means when the system just changes an other module or updates the npm dependencies no restart will be enforced.

The whole deployment is based on the Kudu-Project and this project offers so called Post-Deployment-Action-Hooks to trigger a simple script right after the successful deployment of the sources. When ever the run.js file becomes touched the system just restarts the web service, so the solution for this deployment issue was to write a short batch which touches all run.js files:

@echo off

echo Restarting all WebJobs
for /R ..\wwwroot\App_Data\jobs %%G IN (*run.js) DO echo Touching %%G
for /R ..\wwwroot\App_Data\jobs %%G IN (*run.js) DO touch %%G

exit 0

This script can be registered as Post-Deployment-Action-Hook via FTP at every Azure WebSite. Just copy the file to the following location:

deployment-hooks

This works fine but after all there is still one piece missing: How to get the deployment hooks deployed with git themselves? There are several options to reconfigure the deployment hook directory but I was not able to figure this out. So when you have an idea, feel free and leave a message to discuss any options.

Azure Cost Monitor announces Team-Support

de Azure Cost Monitor , , ,

The azure cost monitor team is very happy to announce the launch of the team-support feature, starting today. This great feature allows enterprise accounts to be accessed by as many users as needed, simplifying the sharing of spending dashboards and cost data within an enterprise.

Team-Support enables companies to use the azure cost monitor without concerning about departmental boundaries and makes processes like cross-charging possible & easy.

What comes with the new team-support feature?

Limitless amount of users: Create an unlimited number of users for your azure cost monitor enterprise account.

Role based access: Define the role of new users and specify whether each user can add new users, renew EA tokens, add new EA contracts and other important actions.

Mail based invitations: Enter the email addresses of the users you would like to invite to your account. The addressed user gets an invitation and can join your team fast and simple.

How to get started?

Adding new users to your azure cost monitor team account is this simple:

  1. Log in to your azure cost monitor account and go to “Manage Teams”

    team-01-manage-team

  2. If you already have an existing account migrate your account into a team account.

    team-02-migrate-team

    This migration only needs to be done once. During this process the system converts your personal account in a team account and assigns all existing enterprise agreements to the team.

  3. Click “Add User to the Team”

    team-03-add-user

  4. Fill in the new user’s email address and choose the users role. After that click “Add” and “Save” the changes.

    team-04-add-user-modal

    The new user will get a mail with instructions for activating the login.

Interested in the team support feature?

The new team support feature brings transparency to all stakeholders within an enterprise and makes azure cloud cost management easy and comfortable.

Try the new team support feature today by simply logging into your azure cost monitor enterprise account. If you don’t have an enterprise subscription, try it for free for a certain time, as we are currently in the technical preview phase.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.