Exivity are very pleased to announce that as of today Exivity is live on the Microsoft Azure Stack Marketplace. The Azure Stack Marketplace is distinct from the Public Azure Marketplace and separate test and acceptance processes needed to be completed before Microsoft approved the offering.
This is because Azure Stack can run offline in “disconnected mode”, so the availability of an internet connection cannot be assumed. Also some features that are available in the public version of Azure are not available in the on-premises version. Since Exivity is public, private or hybrid compatible the on boarding process went smoothly.
We get often requests from companies asking for help getting cost and usage insights across their hybrid cloud infrastructure including, though not limited to, Azure Stack and with Exivity now available on the Azure Stack Marketplace it will be much easier for them to get billing automation up and in running within their Azure Stack infrastructure.
The Azure Stack Marketplace offering provides a quick head-start with Exivity and the product can be explored further by deploying the Azure Stack Template Extractor and Transformer. After you’ve deployed our offering we recommend you reference our Azure Stack integration tutorial in order to learn more about loading Azure Stack consumption data into Exivity.
We are always here to assist you should you have any questions or require guidance. Just drop us an email at support@exivity.com.
2018 is coming to an end and unfortunately, there are still organizations struggling with costs for cloud deployments. Big public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services rely on the accuracy of the information provided by users.
Overlooked services, usage spikes and outages can heavily impact your cloud bill negatively. In some cases, you are even missing out on revenue. In order to have accuracy you need insights into consumption. Multi-cloud environments also come with a lot of complexity from which three key questions emerge:
How do I control my cloud costs?
How do I get accurate up-to-date data instead of having to rely on estimates?
You have read how we can satisfy the desire to control your hybrid or multi-cloud costs, but how do we provide the single bill of IT?
Extract
Exivity incorporates a flexible field-configurable extractor component enabling integration with virtually any end-point. As long as network connectivity is available, consumption, lookup and other data can be extracted for subsequent processing. As a result, extractors for custom data sources can be created with little effort.
Transform
Exivity ships with a powerful ETL engine which empowers you to normalise, enrich and apply business logic to collected data. This enables the automation of complex billing rules resulting in streamlined workflows.
With hybrid-cloud computing on the rise, a big issue on the agenda is cost management. A hybrid-cloud environment introduces significant billing challenges. 42% of participants in an Enterprise Management Survey indicated a desire to control cloud costs. Using Exivity, cloud financial cost insights and billing automation become a breeze a mere few days after installation.
Here at Exivity we are well aware of the problems associated with multi-cloud computing and our product is engineered to make it as simple as possible for you to solve these challenges. We are an experienced team with over 6 years of experience in the hybrid cloud metering and billing market and will guide you step by step along the way.
More cloud means more billing and each environment has different challenges. To address these challenges Exivity can be deployed within your on-prem, public or hybrid cloud environments as a billing tool capable of satisfying virtually any IT service delivery model.
“Exivity offers billing automation solution making it a breeze to gain fine-grained financial insights into Azure spend on Azure Stack. ”
― Talal Alqinawi, Senior Director at Azure Marketing
Exivity can be deployed in seconds using the Azure Marketplace. Exivity can extract usage and pricing information from Microsoft Azure Stack out of the box. The information can then be processed into data with a business logic engine resulting in detailed reports breaking your Azure spend down in virtually any way imaginable. Next to the integration with Azurestack, our team also helps Azure CSP providers to implement Exivity for their customers in order to provide direct insight in their usage as well.
A credible cloud billing solution must be able to provide insightful breakdowns of charges. In addition to per-customer reports it should be possible to ‘slice and dice’ data at deeper levels such that the total spend can be dynamically visualised using arbitrary combinations of criteria such as business unit, region, project and resource group to name only a few.
Ultimately this process is completely dependent on the initial data imported into the system. The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” is particularly apposite when generating financial reports. However with the right tools, knowledge and techniques it may be surprising what can be accomplished with data that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to report against.
Here at Exivity we use the term dirty data to describe information that is not well-formed, which is inconsistent or has holes in it. Typically, dirty data is interleaved within well-formed data and as such needs to be identified and dealt with as it occurs.
Microsoft recently introduced a new Azure offer type for partners in the CSP program. This new program allows CSP partners to purchase, track and manage Azure internal spending. As Microsoft describes it:
With Azure Partner Shared Services partners now have the same flexibility to use Azure subscriptions in CSP as they do in the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement and Web Direct programs. Partners in CSP will now be able to do things like:
Host shared services and multi-tenant applications
Deploy internal workloads and management solutions, that manage different customers with different Azure subscriptions
Not only is the Shared Services usage dedicated to an isolated Azure subscription that belongs to your Partner account, but the pricing for this subscription has its own rate card – which, in general, seems a bit more favorably priced when compared to the standard Azure CSP rate-card. This may bring some interesting opportunities to the table because apart from internal use, Shared Services may also offer applications and services that are shared or multi tenant. Therefore from an economic perspective it may well be advantageous to utilize the functionality of Azure Partner Shared Service to its fullest.
