Written by Adam Wise, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Azure
The Cost Details API is now generally available for use by Enterprise Agreement (EA) and Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) customers. This API provides on-demand download of the granular cost details (formerly referred to as usage details) associated with your Microsoft charges. The API replaces all existing Usage Details APIs and provides data for charges in your invoice. For customers with an MCA agreement this includes Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Azure charges. This API is the go-to solution, along with Exports, for ingesting the raw cost data needed to build any custom reporting solution. To learn more about how to call the Cost Details API, please see our documentation on how to get small cost datasets on demand.
Customers that are not using Exports or the Cost Details API should migrate to one of these solutions moving forward. To learn more about which solution is best for your scenario, see our picking a cost details solution best practices.
Benefits of the new solutions
Both the Cost Details API and Exports provide extensive benefits on top of existing solutions today.
- Security and stability—New solutions require Service Principal and/or user tokens in order to access data. For EA customers, keys used in the EA Reporting APIs are valid for six months. Going forward it is recommended to use token-based solutions through Service Principal or User authentication, consistent with Azure REST APIs.
- Scalability—The EA Reporting APIs (available only for EA customers) and the Consumption Usage Details (available for both EA and MCA customers) aren't built to scale well as your Microsoft and Azure costs increase. The number of Azure cost records in your cost details dataset can get exceedingly large as you deploy more resources into the cloud. The new solutions are asynchronous and have extensive infrastructure enhancements behind them to ensure successful downloads for any size dataset.
- Single dataset for all usage details—For EA customers, the existing EA Reporting APIs have separate endpoints for Azure usage charges versus Azure Marketplace charges. These datasets have been merged in the new solutions. A single dataset reduces the number of APIs that you need to call to see all your charges.
Learn more in the full article
