Overview
Nebula’s usage system is designed to aggregate usage and identify retail and wholesale charges at the level of an Organization. Each NTT Provisioning Entity manages their own Organizations. In most use cases, Organizations represent the end customer of the NTT affiliate or an internal department or project for which the affiliate wants to identify costs.
Each Organization has specific characteristics:
Internal Organization (boolean) – Should be set to TRUE if the Organization represents an internal-use within the NTT affiliate that is not related to delivering services to an end customer. Retail Discounts do not need to be defined for such Organizations.
Retail Discount (boolean) – If Organization delivers Azure services to end customer, NTT Ltd. requires affiliates to report expected discounts off Pay-As-You-Go pricing extended to the end customer as a percentage. Expected discounts greater than 10% require approval per the transactional model.
POC (boolean) – Indicates the Organization is currently being used as “proof of concept” to an end customer, in which case the reported retail discount can exceed 10% for the duration of the POC.
Ringfence Enabled (boolean) – In the underlying partnership contract between NTT Ltd. and Microsoft, there are a specific list of Organizations designated as “ring fenced” that have special contractual status allowing NTT Ltd to deliver “IaaS Services” to meet the Hosting Exception under the agreement. These Organizations have MCP, ECL, or Local Cloud services that are planned to be migrated to Azure. Such Organizations need to be created by a Nebula Administrator through a request. Any delivery of such IaaS services must occur only on Subscriptions associated with Organizations where Ringfence Enabled = TRUE. Contact CID support for more information.
Organizations and Azure Usage/Charges
In terms of Microsoft Azure usage, Nebula will compute Azure Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) charges based on the aggregate usage across all Azure Subscriptions associated with an Organization using the price structure for the Azure Pay-As-You Go (AZR-0003P) and Pay-As-You-GO Dev/Test (AZR-0023P) offers. Some Azure meters (SKU) have tiered usage pricing where the price decreases based on quantity. Aggregating its Subscription usage allows the Organization to take advantage of the lower costs associated with such tiered pricing. However, since usage is aggregated, the Nebula usage feed does not directly provide any breakdown of the pricing between different Subscriptions.
For use cases where Azure is being used to support an end-customer service, the Provisioning Entity should evaluate any billing impacts of this behavior when provisioning Subscriptions. If the Subscription usage can be aggregated into the same bill as an existing Organization, provision the Subscription on the existing Organization. If a separate bill is required, a new Organization should be created since the usage is reported on a “per Organization” basis. These mappings can be changed by moving the Subscription between Organizations as described in How Do I Move a Subscription to a Different Organization?
More information on Azure usage is available at Introduction to Usage Reporting
Organizations and Secure Connect Usage/Charges
Secure Connect Tenant usage can also be associated with an Organization, but unlike Azure, if multiple Secure Connect Tenants are provisioned under an organization, the system does not aggregate the usage. Each Secure Connect Tenant’s usage is evaluated and reported separately. Secure Connect Tenants cannot currently be moved between Organizations. More details are available at Secure Connect Usage and Pricing.