Are there any Partner Generated Billing (PGB) best practices I can review?

Products

• CloudHealth

Issue/Introduction

This article provides an overview of the processes of PGB and highlights some of the main questions that may arise.

 

Processes

PGB is run when we collect and process the partner's billing file.  This will typically happen 3 times a day. The processes are:

 

Pre-processing

• CloudHealth references a PGB account assignment list
• The platform reads through the Partner billing file, pull out line items and put these into the "pbprep" file as per the table of account assignments
• Credits are stripped out
• A "pbprep" file contains line items as they are shown in the original partner billing file

 

Creating the end customer RBD

• CloudHealth stores AWS rates
• Converts ALL usage to on-demand
• Resets bulk discount tiering
• Applies RI benefits on a first come, first serve basis; account affinity is not applied
• Credits are then applied (if they have been assigned from the Partner tenant)
• Billing rules are then applied last

NOTE  You will only see credits and billing rules in the total of the statement, not as line items

Statement Generation is a separate process that runs completely independent of PGB.  This process is triggered each time a new billing file is dropped by AWS which occurs a few times each day.

 

Best Practices When Creating a Customer

• Credentials are passed down not up
• It is possible to re-sync the External IDs from within the Customer tenant by clicking on the ‘sync’ icon on the Account setup page, which in essence ‘pulls down’ the External ID from the Partner tenant
• You must create the customer and accounts at the Partner tenant level first
• Once a customer has been created, you can then assign the accounts for PGB if necessary
• All Accounts for a single Customer should ideally derive from one consolidated bill but consult your Technical Account Manager (TAM) if you have questions

 

Partner Billing Rules

New billing rules will only apply to the current month, even if the start month is set to a previous month, and will be applied during an overnight process.

In order for the billing rule to apply to any past months we would need to request that PGB for those months are rerun.

 

Bill Stitching

If a partner customer ever has costs in more than 1 consolidated bill in 1 month, then CloudHealth will need to perform bill stitching.

A likely phenomenon that determines if bill stitching is needed is that there will be missing costs at the end customer level.  You can determine this by using the Cost History report at the partner level, filtering by the customers accounts and categorizing by billing account.

When migrating an account from one consolidated bill to another, the Partner should try to complete this at the end of the month where possible to avoid the need for bill stitching.

 

Moving from One Partner to another

If a customer moves from one partner to another, in most cases the ‘new’ partner will want the historical data to be displayed.

In these cases, consult your TAM should reach out to the ‘old’ partner to confirm their permission for the transfer of this data.

If the TAM gets approval, CloudHealth can transfer the customer in its entirety from the ‘old’ partner to the ‘new’ using the ‘Partner Linkage Management’ tool in the Proactive Support page.

 

Credits

Credits will not show in the "pbprep" file, so for credits within that file will return no results.

Once a credit has been assigned to a customer from the partner tenant, the credit will be assigned to the first AWS Account that CloudHealth sees belonging to the customer in the database.  If the credit value exceeds the total spend of Account 1, the credit will spillover into Account 2 and so on until the credit is “spent”.

A credit can only ever be assigned to the specific customer it was originally assigned to by AWS. For example, a Partner cannot assign a credit from Customer A to Customer B.  To create a credit for Customer B, they should create a custom billing rule.

Credits should always be assigned to a customer after the bills have finalized from AWS.  This is because if AWS updates the credit throughout the month, we will automatically un-assign the credit from the customer.

 

Moving Accounts from one Consolidated Bill to Another

If a customer moves an account that is currently assigned to a customer from one Consolidated Bill to another, this change will not automatically be reflected on the PGB assignment page of the customer.  Instead, you will see the accounts show as "Disabled".  The process is the following:

1. "Disabled" accounts will need to be removed from the list
2. The Consolidated Bill needs to be updated to the new customer's billing account
3. Accounts then should be re-added to the new customer

 

Bill Currency Conversion

OANDA provides the conversion rates for CloudHealth.

This conversion is only visible in the customers statement, downloaded from the Partner tenant.

If you were to choose a conversion date prior to “today”, the current statements will not convert, you will see the conversion take place on the chosen date of the next month.

If you choose a conversion date of after “today”, no conversions will take place until that date.

All visible statements will be converted.