This article provide an overview of the Nebula system’s functionality
Nebula acts as the provisioning and usage tracking system for Azure usage under the NTT-Microsoft Strategic Agreement that is delivered through the NTT Ltd. Cloud Services Division. It is designed to be used by employees of NTT affiliates to provision Azure Subscriptions for such services and acquire usage information needed for cost management or end-customer billing.
In the context of Microsoft Azure, Nebula usually replaces the functionality delivered by the Azure EA Portal. Within Nebula, each NTT affiliate (called a “Provisioning Entity”) creates and manages their own Organizations (roughly equivalent to end customer or department) as described in How do I Add an Organization?. Each Nebula Organization represents a billable entity that can have one or more Azure Subscriptions. Usage across all of an Organizations’ Subscriptions is aggregated when rated by Nebula’s usage system.
A Provisioning Entity requests Azure Subscriptions for an Organization through Nebula. Based on the characteristics of the Organization, Nebula provisions Subscriptions in the appropriate NTT Ltd. Enterprise Agreement SCE and provides credentials that can be used to transfer the Subscription into the target Azure Active Directory. For details on provisioning, see How do I Provision an Azure Subscription for an Organization?
At the end of each month, Nebula gathers usage information from Azure and calculates Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) charges for the Organization’s subscriptions and provides reporting for downstream cost management and end-customer billing. Through Nebula’s reporting, each Provisioning Entity has Organization-level usage and PAYG cost data for “retail” costing or invoicing. A more detailed overview of this functionality is available at Introduction to Usage Reporting. The Cloud Services Division invoices the NTT affiliate entity based on this same data after applying affiliate discounts on applicable usage as described in Discount Eligible Azure Meters.
In addition to Azure, Nebula also supports provisioning and usage functions for some additional Cloud Services Division services. Functions within Nebula are covered within the Nebula documentation but the services that are covered in separate documentation sections:
- Cloud Core Services: https://docs.cloud-services.ltd/article-categories/coreservices/
- Secure Connect: https://docs.cloud-services.ltd/article-categories/secureconnect/
- Azure Subscription Tracking: https://docs.cloud-services.ltd/article-categories/nttsp-operator-portal/
See Important Azure and Nebula Terms and Definitions for further definitions of terms found in this article