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FAQs

Commitment Management lets nOps buy and manage Azure Reservations and Savings Plans for you. nOps watches your usage, recommends commitment levels, and buys when it finds savings.
  • Reservations: discounts on a specific resource type (for example Virtual Machines or SQL Database) in a specific region. They save the most (up to 72%) but are less flexible.
  • Savings Plans: discounts on an hourly spend commitment across a broader range of compute services. They’re more flexible and save a little less.
nOps manages both to get you the most savings.
nOps staff buy in the Azure portal through Azure Lighthouse. You delegate each subscription purchases are billed to with one template, the nOps Commitment Management delegation. It gives the nOps Customer Access Operators group, in the nOps tenant:
  • Reader, to see the subscription
  • Reservation Purchaser and Savings plan Purchaser, to buy commitments billed to it
Your enrollment or billing profile must also allow purchases: on EA, the Reserved Instances and Add Savings Plan policies; on MCA, the billing profile’s Azure Reservation purchases and Azure Savings Plan policies, set to Yes. Commitment Management adds nothing at the tenant, billing, or storage level, and nothing for the nOps.io application.
In the nOps tenant. When nOps staff buy through Lighthouse, Azure creates the reservation or savings plan order in the buyer’s tenant. You still pay for it, because it’s billed to your purchase subscription, and it applies to your resources: shared commitments cover your enrollment or billing profile. You see it in Cost Management + Billing, not under Reservations in your own tenant.If you stop using nOps, nOps moves your reservations to your tenant. Savings plans can’t change tenant after purchase, so they stay in the nOps tenant until they end.
Any active subscription in your enrollment or billing profile works, including one you already use or one that already has commitments. It must sit under the management group you connected in Savings Analysis. nOps only bills purchases to it. If you prefer to keep purchasing apart from your workloads, create an empty subscription for it.
  • EA: one subscription in your enrollment. Shared commitments cover every subscription in the enrollment.
  • MCA: one subscription in each billing profile you want nOps to buy for. Shared commitments cover the subscriptions in that subscription’s billing profile.
Both, for different things:
  • Seeing costs and commitments: once, at the billing account. Savings Analysis already gives nOps.io Billing account reader, which covers every billing profile, including ones you add later.
  • Buying: once per billing profile. Microsoft only lets someone buy a reservation through a subscription where they hold Owner or Reservation Purchaser, even billing account owners. The subscription’s billing profile decides which invoice pays and which subscriptions a shared commitment covers, and a shared commitment never covers another billing profile. So nOps needs one delegated subscription in each billing profile it buys for, and no billing account role replaces that.
With many billing profiles, the wizard lists them all and gives you one command that delegates every subscription at once.
Set it up the same way. Your existing commitments keep applying and stay where they are, and nOps sees them in the billing data Savings Analysis already reads.If nOps already buys for that billing profile through an earlier nOps delegation, enter the same subscription. Deploying the template updates that delegation in place, and nOps keeps managing what it bought. If Azure rejects the update, remove the old delegation under Service providers and deploy again.
nOps can exchange or refund the reservations it buys, without extra roles: the buyer owns the order. nOps also makes its operations team a co-owner of every order it buys, including earlier ones, so managing a commitment never depends on one person’s account. Partial exchanges are allowed, and Microsoft limits refunds to USD 50,000 in a rolling 12 months per enrollment or billing profile. Savings plans can’t be canceled, refunded, or exchanged by anyone.Reservations you bought yourself live in your tenant. Lighthouse can’t delegate them, so nOps can’t exchange or refund them there. If you want nOps to manage one, its owner can move it to nOps with Change directory; your nOps contact will walk you through it. Moving it doesn’t change who pays or which subscriptions a shared reservation covers. Savings plans can’t change tenant after purchase, so you keep managing the ones you bought (their scope and renewal).
Verify lists the billing profiles nOps has no purchase subscription for, so a new one shows up there. Check connectivity in Settings runs the same check, and you see the list when you open the integration’s Verify step. To include it, open the integration, enter a subscription for the new profile in step 1, deploy the delegation on that subscription, turn on the purchase policies on the new billing profile, and Verify again.
Nothing. Savings Analysis stays active the whole time, even if a Commitment Management check fails. Only Verify turns Commitment Management on. Once it has passed, it turns off only when a Verify finds something missing, such as the delegation or a policy. A read that failed doesn’t change it.
No. Commitment Inventory is included on every nOps plan when your Azure integration is active. Inform is only required to email or schedule inventory reports.

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Overview

Commitment Management is the second tier of Azure onboarding. It builds on Savings Analysis and lets nOps:
  • Buy and manage Azure Reservations for you
  • Buy and manage Azure Savings Plans for you
  • Watch utilization and adjust commitment levels
Set up Savings Analysis first. Commitment Management is added to a verified Savings Analysis integration. If you haven’t set it up yet, start with Savings Analysis Setup.
Before you start
  • A verified Savings Analysis integration. Find it in nOps Settings > Cloud Provider Integrations and look for Enable CM.
  • Owner on each subscription you’ll use for purchases, to deploy the delegation.
  • EA: an Enterprise Administrator, if the purchase policies need turning on.
  • MCA: a billing profile owner or contributor, if the purchase policies need turning on.
  • MCA billing account: keep the Billing account reader role on nOps.io from Savings Analysis. Verify uses it to check which billing profile each purchase subscription bills to.

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What Commitment Management adds

Earlier versions of this setup asked for Reservation Purchaser and Savings plan Purchaser for nOps.io, Reservations Administrator and Savings Plan Reader at the tenant, EA Purchaser or Billing account contributor, and Owner on the export storage account. None of these are needed now: nOps staff buy through the Lighthouse delegation. If you already have the older “nOps FinOps Management (Dedicated Subscription)” delegation, deploying the new template replaces it. If Azure rejects that, remove the old delegation under Service providers and deploy again. If Commitment Management is already on from the earlier setup, it stays on: open the integration and click Verify Permissions to run the new check. On EA, a service principal holds only one EA billing role. If you gave nOps.io EA Purchaser for the earlier setup, it replaced EnrollmentReader. If you remove EA Purchaser, assign EnrollmentReader to nOps.io again so Savings Analysis keeps its billing access.

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Step 1: Choose purchase subscriptions

1

Open the wizard

In nOps Settings > Cloud Provider Integrations, find your verified Azure integration and click Enable CM. Or click Set Up Commitment Management after Savings Analysis verifies.
2

Enter the subscriptions

The wizard shows the layout for how you connected Savings Analysis:
  • EA: one subscription. We fill in your Savings Analysis export subscription; change it if you like.
  • MCA billing account: one row for each billing profile in your billing account. Enter a subscription billed to each profile you want nOps to buy for, and leave the others blank. If you only want some profiles managed, fill in only those. If nOps can’t list your billing profiles, you get a plain list instead: add one subscription per billing profile, and Verify tells you which profile each one bills to.
  • MCA billing profiles: one row for each billing profile you connected. Enter a subscription billed to that profile, or leave a row blank to skip the profile. To add a profile, connect it in Savings Analysis first.
A subscription bills to one billing profile, so the wizard won’t take the same subscription twice.
3

Click Continue

nOps saves the subscriptions and opens Run Setup.
A subscription’s billing profile is on its Overview page in the Azure portal.

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Run the setup

The wizard walks you through two steps, A and B. A. Delegate purchasing to nOps Do this on every purchase subscription. You need Owner on it.
1

Open the template

In the wizard, click Deploy to Azure. It opens the nOps Commitment Management template in the Azure portal.
2

Deploy it

Select the purchase subscription and any region, then click Review + create > Create. The deployment takes under a minute.
3

Repeat

Deploy it again for each other purchase subscription.
Prefer the command line? The wizard shows a ready-to-run command for your subscriptions; run it in Azure Cloud Shell (Bash). For one subscription it looks like this:
For several billing profiles, the wizard gives you one loop over every purchase subscription. It keeps going if one fails and prints Delegated or FAILED for each, so you can fix and re-run only what failed. Running it again is safe.
You’ll see the delegation under Service providers in the Azure portal, where you can remove it at any time. B. Check the purchase policies Microsoft only lets subscription purchasers buy commitments when your enrollment or billing profile allows it.
1

Open Policies

Go to Cost Management + Billing, select your EA billing account, then Policies.
2

Turn on purchases

Turn on Reserved Instances and Add Savings Plan, then click Save. An Enterprise Administrator can change these.
When you’re done, click I’ve completed all steps.

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Verify

1

Wait a few minutes

A new delegation can take a few minutes to show up.
2

Click Verify Permissions

For each purchase subscription, nOps checks that:
  • nOps can see the subscription (Reader from Savings Analysis covers it), and it is active, not disabled or deleted
  • MCA billing account: it is billed to your billing account
  • the nOps Commitment Management delegation is on it and gives nOps staff Reservation Purchaser and Savings plan Purchaser
  • MCA: it bills to the billing profile you chose
  • the purchase policies allow purchases: Reserved Instances and Add Savings Plan on (EA), or Azure Reservation purchases and Azure Savings Plan set to Yes (MCA)
If the delegation is missing Reader (an older template), or nOps can’t read a purchase policy, Verify shows a note instead of failing. It also notes two subscriptions that bill to the same billing profile, since one is enough.MCA billing account: nOps must also read which billing profile each subscription bills to. If it can’t, Verify fails and asks you to check that nOps.io still has Billing account reader, then run Verify again. If Commitment Management is already on, it stays on. On a billing profiles connection, that read only shows a note.MCA: Verify also says how many of your billing profiles have a purchase subscription and names the ones that don’t. On a billing account connection, a subscription counts only for the billing profile nOps confirms it bills to. Skipping a profile is fine; the list is there so a new billing profile doesn’t go unnoticed.
3

Review the result

Verify also re-checks Savings Analysis. When Savings Analysis and every purchase subscription pass, you’ll see Commitment Management Verified, and nOps can start buying for you.

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Additional resources