Finally, everybody needs to make money and be profitable with a cloud solution. This is why we need a billing model. The basis for a billing model in general is the usage data that provides information about how long which resource is running and being used. This data is saved in SQL and builds the basis for your billing. The best way to report usage data is PowerBI. PowerBI is a SQL big data solution by Azure that gives you a nice overview of data. The billing possibilities will be described later in this book too:

In addition to the possibilities of rich reporting, this data can be exported to CSV and reused in the customer's billing tool for charging its customers on a more or less easy and half-automated way.

If you need more features and functionality, there are third-party resource providers available to provide a more comprehensive but easy-to-use usage reporting feature that could fit better with customer needs, but this also means investing money and resources in these resource providers, because in general, you need a dedicated server to provide the business logic of this tool.