Can’t add an Azure budget after a new subscription?

I am sure you ran into the situation where you create a new subscription, but want to add an Azure budget to help monitor and control spend. As you know, it can take some time for the subscription to sync with the EA portal. Here is a snippet from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/costs/tutorial-acm-create-budgets stating If you have a new subscription, you can’t immediately create a budget or use other Cost Management features. It might take up to 48 hours before you can use all Cost Management features. I don’t want to wait or try and remember adding a budget the next day. Let’s use Azure tools to solve this problem to automatically create a budget for us.

When I first read that statement above, I was thinking how to keep track of the new subscription details and have it automatically create the budget. I thought, why not use an Azure storage queue? I can start a runbook that creates the subscription, pops a message on the queue and will try every so often to create the budget. If successful, remove the message from the queue, but if not, keep it on and retry a few hours later. Let’s take a look at a snippet of the relevant code below.

$storageAccount = get-AzStorageAccount -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup -Name $storageAccountName 
$ctx = $storageAccount.Context
 
# Retrieve a specific queue
$queue = Get-AzStorageQueue –Name $queueName –Context $ctx
 
#create message
# Create a new message using a constructor of the CloudQueueMessage class
$queueMessage = [Microsoft.Azure.Storage.Queue.CloudQueueMessage]::new("$subName;$ownerupn")
 
# Add a new message to the queue
$queue.CloudQueue.AddMessage($queueMessage,$null)

The code above is self explanatory. Get the queue information and pop a message with the subscription name and owner. We can create another runbook that runs every few hours to process messages on the queue.

 
$storageAccount = get-AzStorageAccount -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup -Name $storageAccountName 
 
$ctx = $storageAccount.Context
$invisibleTimeout = [System.TimeSpan]::FromSeconds(60)
$queue = Get-AzStorageQueue –Name $queueName –Context $ctx

if ($queue.QueueProperties.ApproximateMessagesCount -gt 0) {
 
    $queueMessage = $queue.CloudQueue.GetMessageAsync($invisibleTimeout, $null, $null)
    $msg = $queueMessage.Result.AsString
    Select-AzSubscription $msg.Split(';')[0]
 
    New-AzConsumptionBudget -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -ErrorVariable cmdletError -Amount 1000 -Name "$($msg.Split(';')[0])-budget" -Category Cost -TimeGrain Monthly -StartDate (Get-Date -Format yyyy-MM).ToString() -ContactEmail 'IT@contoso.com', $($msg.Split(';')[1]) -NotificationKey Key1 -NotificationThreshold 90 -NotificationEnabled 

    if ($cmdletError) {
        $cmdletError
        Write-Warning "Subscription $($msg.Split(';')[0]) might still be provisioning to ea portal. Will try again in a couple of hours..."
    }
    else {
        $queue.CloudQueue.DeleteMessageAsync($queueMessage.Result.Id, $queueMessage.Result.popReceipt)
 
    }
}

The runbook will check if the queue has a message, process the message, select into the newly create Azure subscription and create a new budget. If it throws an exception, write a warning and keep the message on the queue to try again later. If it does create a budget, we can safely delete the message.

It’s simple and does the job. There are 10 ways to solve a challenge and this is just one of them. Hope it helps!