Azure spending notifications are offline, customers warned of potential price spikes
Tracking and notifications for Azure Savings Plans, Microsoft’s discount program for customers with consistent usage rates, is offline due to a technical failure and is not expected to be restored until mid-March.
In an announcement dated Feb. 1 on its Partner Center website, the cloud giant is warning partners that Azure spend notifications are temporarily unavailable for Azure Savings Plans.
“If you have purchased Azure Savings Plans for your customers, even if you set budgets for their customers, you are temporarily unable to receive Azure spending notifications,” the notice reads.
“This means you won’t know how much your customers are spending on Azure in real time. Instead, you’ll need to track how and how much your customers are using Azure resources.
Azure Savings Plans can reduce prices by up to 65% from pay-as-you-go rates if customers commit to a fixed hourly spend over a one- or three-year period. The program is metered and if a user exceeds the contacted usage, prices revert immediately to pay-as-you-go pricing.
Users can purchase the program directly through the Azure portal, but it’s often administered by Microsoft partners, resellers who manage Azure cloud resources for their end customers. These partners will now have to monitor usage manually, Microsoft says.
Commenting on the announcement, Mark Boost, CEO of native cloud service provider Civo, said customers can easily get locked into such discounted deals and should beware of additional costs when monitoring facilities are unavailable. .
“The rising cost of the cloud is a huge issue for many organizations, especially with the current economic difficulties sweeping the country,” Boost said.
“Hyperscalers’ solutions have focused on offering significantly lower prices only if you commit to hard-to-leave one- to three-year contracts with the promise of lowering your bill provided you stay within a fixed limit. What we have however, providers are not properly informing you that you have exceeded your monthly expenses and are increasing your bills without your knowledge.
“The push for easy-to-use solutions that are actually complicated and unreliable is luring people into a false sense of security and relying on hyperscaler vendors instead of looking elsewhere.”
Despite the risks of overreliance on a single cloud provider, many organizations find it too difficult and/or too expensive to diversify, according to new IT research.
Join us online on February 22 for Deskflix: Hybrid and Multi-Cloud, where we’ll discuss cloud cost management.