Microsoft says Azure spending notifications are unavailable for customers of its Azure Savings Plans until mid-March due to a “technical problem with our internal processing system” -- a lengthy wait of up to six weeks for restoration, during which admins will need to keep a manual watch over Azure spend.
Azure Savings Plans lets customers buy cloud services through partners at a discount if they agree to spend a fixed hourly amount on compute services for one or three years. It is available for Azure VMs, Azure Dedicated Host, Azure App Service and Azure Container instances, among other services.
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“If you bought Azure Savings Plans for your customers, even if you set budgets, you temporarily won't get Azure spending notifications. Not getting those notifications could make it difficult for you to manage Azure resources for your customers because you won’t be able to see how much is being spent in real time.”
That's how Redmond spelled it out on February 1.
With cloud bill shock a regular issue for many customers, the Azure spending notifications failure could post a real monitoring headache for many. (Many cloud adopters have been stung on their bills. Configuration can require more manual finessing than many give credit for and some simple oversights have caught many users out, including Troy Hunt, who detailed getting unexpectedly hit with a A$11,000 Azure bill after a flurry of new files bypassed Cloudflare caching that had been helping tackle egress bandwidth from Azure.)
“We expect notifications to be restored by middle of March 2023” the company added in a blog.
Azure spending notifications down for partners
The company suggests that partners "regularly review unbilled usage data for cost spikes."
The issue caps a frustrating start to 2023 for Microsoft customers who have also had to deal with a Windows Defender update on January 13 that saw new rules delete Windows applications from customers' machines.
(Or, more specifically but also opaquely, as Microsoft put it: "False positive detections for the Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) rule "Block Win32 API calls from Office macro" after updating to security intelligence builds between 1.381.2134.0 and 1.381.2163.0. These detections resulted in the deletion of files that matched the incorrect detection logic primarily impacting Windows shortcut (.lnk) files...")
There was a also the code update to Microsoft's Wide Area Network on January 25 that triggered global Azure network failures and a rule change to Git that broke a lot of builds downstream for developers.
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