In this post I’m going to have a look at the Azure Enterprise Agreement Billing API and billing updates. The updates enable emailing invoices and some PowerShell cmdlets to retrieve invoices.
Emailing Invoices
You can opt in to receive your monthly invoice via email, which beats logging into the portal to download them every time. You’ll find the options to configure recipients on the Invoices menu in the Subscriptions blade.
This feature is only available to consumer Azure subscriptions.
PowerShell Invoice Cmdlet
The Get-AzureRmBillingInvoice cmdlet that provides the ability to download invoices is currently in preview. Before you can successfully use the cmdlet you have to enable access to your invoices in the Subscription blade of the Azure Portal.
By default users with Subscription administration access will be able to retrieve invoices. You can grant other users access by assigning the Billing Reader role to users from the Access Control menu on the Subscription blade.
Calling the Get-AzureRmBillingInvoice cmdlet doesn’t return the actual invoice but rather an Invoice object that contains amongst others a DownloadURL property that you can use to download the invoice. Note the URL is valid for 1 hour.
Login-AzureRmAccount $inv = Get-AzureRmBillingInvoice -Latest Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $inv.DownloadUrl -OutFile C:\Temp\Invoice.pdf
This feature is only available to consumer Azure subscriptions.
Invoice Retrieval For Enterprise Agreement Customers
If your are an EA customer the above method won’t work for you but you can download your usage and charges using the Billing Rest API for EA customers. In some respects this is easier for EA customers since the dataset returned contains usage and charges, you don’t have to calculate it separately. Before using the API you have to get your API key from the EA portal.
You can find out more about using the API in this channel 9 video which also contains this link in the show notes that describes the API.
PowerBI Integration With The EA Portal
You can also export your billing data to PowerBI from the EA portal using the Power BI Reporting tab on the Reports menu. This functionality is provided by the Power BI Enterprise Pack, although it is a manual process to export data the first time, you can schedule the dataset to refresh automatically, more here and you can subscribe to report emails, it is in preview so the functionality is still evolving, more here.
Retrieve Usage Using PowerShell Cmdlets
The Get-UsageAggregates cmdlet is not a new feature but I didn’t get a chance to cover it yet. You can use it to retrieve resource usage, take note that the cmdlet makes use of a continuation token since the dataset can be quite large if you download detailed usage. Your billing charges can be calculated by retrieving the rates separately using the RateCard API and matching it to your usage, I covered the RateCard API in a previous post. The Get-UsageAggregates cmdlet is available to consumer Azure subscriptions and Enterprise Agreement subscriptions but the RateCard API is for consumer Azure subscriptions only.
