Share via

Create an Azure plan

  • Article

You can purchase, create, and manage an Azure plan by using the Partner Center APIs. The process is similar to creating a Microsoft Azure (MS-AZR-0145P) subscription. You must get the catalog item for the Azure plan, and then create and submit an order.

Prerequisites

Get the catalog item for the Azure plan

Before you can create an Azure plan for a customer, you need to retrieve the corresponding catalog item. You can retrieve the catalog item by using the existing Partner Center catalog APIs with the following resource models:

  • Product: A grouping construct for purchasable goods or services. A product itself isn't a purchasable item.
  • SKU: A purchasable stock-keeping unit (SKU) under a product. SKUs represent the varieties of the product.
  • Availability: A configuration in which a SKU is available for purchase (such as country/region, currency, or industry segment).

To obtain the catalog item for an Azure plan, complete the following steps:

  1. Identify and retrieve the product identifier for the Azure plan. Follow the steps in Get a list of products (by country/region) and specify targetView as MicrosoftAzure. (If you already know the product identifier for the Azure plan, you can follow the steps in Get a product by ID instead.)

  2. Retrieve the SKU from the product for the Azure plan. Follow the steps in Get a list of SKUs for a product (by country/region). If you already know the SKU identifier for the Azure plan, you can follow the steps in Get a SKU by ID instead.

  3. Retrieve the availability from the SKU for the Azure plan. Follow the steps in Get a list of availabilities for a SKU (by country/region). If you already know the identifier for the availability that you need, you can follow the steps in Get the availability by ID instead.

    Be sure to note the value of the CatalogItemId property of the availability for the Azure plan. You need this value to create an order.

Create and submit an order

To submit your order for an Azure plan, follow these steps:

  1. Create a cart to hold the collection of catalog items that you intend to buy. When you create a cart, the cart line items are automatically grouped based on what can be purchased together in the same order. (You can also update a cart.)
  2. Check out the cart, which results in the creation of an order.

Get order details

You can retrieve the details of an individual order by using the order ID. You can also retrieve a list of all orders for a specific customer.

After an order is submitted, there's a delay of up to 15 minutes before it appears in the customer's order list.

Manage Azure plans

After the order is successfully processed, a Partner Center subscription resource is created for the Azure plan. You can use the following methods for managing Partner Center subscription resources to manage the Azure plan:

When an Azure plan is created in Partner Center, a corresponding Azure usage subscription is also created in Azure. You can also create additional Azure usage subscriptions under the same Azure plan by using the Azure portal and Azure APIs. You can obtain the identifiers of all the Azure usage subscriptions associated with an Azure plan by following the steps in Get a list of Azure entitlements for a subscription.

Manage the subscription life cycle

You can suspend an existing Azure plan only if it no longer has any active usage assets associated with it, including Azure usage subscriptions and Azure reservations. To suspend an existing Azure plan, follow the steps in Suspend a subscription.

For details on how to disable Azure usage subscriptions, see the Azure API on subscription life-cycle management.

To remove existing Azure reservations, you must cancel the reservations.

After you suspend an Azure plan, you can reactivate it. For details on how to reactivate an Azure plan, see Reactivate a suspended subscription.

Transition existing CSP offers to an Azure plan

You can't create an Azure plan for an existing customer with a Microsoft Azure (MS-AZR-0145P) subscription. But you can transition a customer from existing Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Azure offers to Azure services under the Azure plan in the new commerce experience in the CSP program from within Partner Center. To transition an existing customer, use the product upgrade APIs to follow these steps:

  1. Check whether the customer is eligible for a transition to an Azure plan.
  2. Initiate a product upgrade for the customer.
  3. Check the status of a product upgrade.

Track Azure spending

You can track Azure spending by querying for a usage summary and detailed usage records via the following methods:

You can also set and manage a customer usage budget by using the following methods:

Manage invoices and reconciliation

You can manage invoices and reconciliation data by using the following methods: