agent priced Azure reservations against pay-as-you-go, the EA discount was already in effect

TL;DR

An Enterprise Agreement discount already lowers what you pay below the public rate, so reservation math must start from the EA-discounted price. Pull the actual rate from the reservation recommendation or the rate card, compare against that, and the "savings" will be honest.

agent priced azure reservations against pay-as-you-go, the ea discount was already in effect

Use this when

• An Azure reservation recommendation shows savings that do not match realized bills.
• The math uses public pay-as-you-go prices while an EA is in effect.
• Finance questions why the reservation barely moved the invoice.

Not for this skill when

• There is no EA or the agreement expired. Pay-as-you-go is then the correct baseline.
• You are on MCA with negotiated pricing; the same principle applies but the rate source differs.

Steps

1. Confirm the EA is active and find the discount level on the enrollment. Verify: the rate card or price sheet shows the discounted unit price.
2. Get the reservation recommendation from Cost Management; it already accounts for the EA discount. Verify: the recommended savings match your manual math.
3. Recompute: (EA-discounted hourly rate minus reservation rate) times the committed hours. That is the real saving.
4. Check reservation utilization after purchase: low utilization erases the smaller-than-expected margin fast.
5. Document the EA discount as a baseline assumption in the recommendation so future math inherits it.

Variant phrasings

azure reservation savings lower than expected ea

The billing-side phrasing.

reservation recommendation ignored enterprise discount

The agent-mistake framing.

azure rate card vs pay as you go reservation math

The data-source question.

Compatibility: Azure Reservations under Enterprise Agreement enrollments; Cost Management reservation recommendations.

Why it happens

Public pricing pages are easy to scrape; EA price sheets are not. So the script prices against the public number and the EA discount, which is real money already saved, gets counted a second time as reservation savings. The recommendation looks brilliant and the invoice disagrees.

Edge cases / pitfalls

• EA discounts vary by service and tier; do not apply one blanket percentage to all reservation math.
• Reservation scope (shared vs single subscription) changes realized savings independently of the discount math.
• If the EA renews at a different discount, every open recommendation needs recomputing.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pstQzEPGAQpzMZkr3H0FA7aw