Cost Estimation not showing prices

[agrob]

Good Day

Deployed VBA in a Test Subscription for Evaluation and for Cost Estimation for a new Backup Infrastructure. I can create a new Policy, add VMs, configure Snapshot and/or restore points (tried scheduled and manual) but when i check the "Cost Estimation" it is never showing prices. i tried to configure snapshots only or backups only but prices never show up. Just the ? and Message "Price is unknown. It an occur when prices for resources are not downloaded yet or when there is some problem with getting price from Microsoft Azure"

Is there any way to fix this?

Thanks

[nielsengelen]

Hi Andre, can you contact support for assistance here? It could be this is an issue within Azure causing this bug but we can't know for sure without extra details. Can u let us know the case ID once created?

[agrob]

Hi Niels,
Sure, Case ID# 04189571

[-Charles]

I also have this issue, only question marks are shown on the estimated costs section.

[Mike Resseler]

Charles,

Do you have a case ID?

Also, when does this happen, when you create the policy and first add some VMs? Or editing the policy?

[agrob]

Support found following error in the logs:

5/22/2020 5:20:49 AM 28 (1) Warning: Cost estimation cannot find the price list item for subcategory GeneralBlockBlobV2 operation WriteOperations and redundancy LocallyRedundant in region westeurope

So i created two new test vms, one in "switzerland north", one in "uk south". Also i crated a new storage account in location "sitzwerland north".
Included the newly created vms in the vba backup policy, also changed backup target in vba to the new storage account. But still no prices are shown.

i let you know once i got more news.

[Mike Resseler]

Thanks Andre for keeping us informed.

[agrob]

Just a short update. At the moment it looks like the problem is related to the Azure Subscription type:

"The reason behind this error is because CSP based subscriptions are black-listed from getting data directly from Rate Card APIs directly"

Support is still working on it.

On the other hand, if i login to the azure portal and check "Cost analysis" in the portal itself, i can see and thrill down costs in the CSP Subscription. So it would be interesting to know where those prices are comming from and if VBA could maybe access the same pricing source...? I'll send another update when we know more (but i'm OoO the next few weeks)

[dalbertson]

I can confirm this...i am tracking this down as well.

CSP based subs are blocked from the rate card i beleive by default for the flow they want is MS->CSP->Customer.

when running the get-ratecard api on a CSP account it errors with Invoke-RestMethod : {"error":{"code":"DisallowedProvider","message":"The operation is not permitted for namespace 'Microsoft.Commerce'.
@agrob I am working with support/QA on this and will keep this thread informed.

[agrob]

@dalbertson Thank you!

[agrob]

just a short update. There is a hotfix available for this. You can contact support:

....We currently have a hotfix which should import prices. I am attaching it to the case. Installing this hotfix should not be complicated.
Please note that the price list is based off of public prices. Any special promotions for lower prices will not be reflected in our estimations.....

I have installed the hotfix and now prices are shown. I discovered that you have to enable a schedule in the job policy setting. if you select "manually" in the schedule tab, no prices are displayed.

[nielsengelen]

Thanks for letting us know @agrob. Great to see it got resolved.