Introduction to the Partner Platform

As a partner you can use VMware Tanzu CloudHealth on several hyperscalers to manage customers, simplify the billing process, and gain complete insight into a customer’s environment. The Partner Platform supported by Tanzu CloudHealth manages billing and cost operations of a customer. This section lists the common terminology used in the context of Tanzu CloudHealth’s Partner Platform.

Glossary

Partner

A Partner uses the Tanzu CloudHealth platform to provide a service to their customers. The service can range from billing of public cloud resale (AWS, Azure, GCP), cost visibility, to reporting.

The Partner Platform within Tanzu CloudHealth is multi-tenanted which allows you to manage all your customers from your Partner Tenant. This allows you to create, delete customers, and assign cloud accounts to customers. A customer tenant is completely isolated from others.

Channel

This is the Partner ecosystem. A channel could be a reseller, service provider, vendor, retailer, or an agent that partners with another organization to market or sell their services, products, or technology.

Channel Customer

A Channel Customer is the client of the partner, also referred to as a Partner End Customer. Tanzu CloudHealth helps partners provide a service to their customers whether they purchase cloud services from a hyperscaler directly (such as AWS, Azure, and GCP), or through a partner.

Channel Customers can view their own data in the channel customer tenant, but will not have access to any of the other Channel Customers’ data in the Partner’s tenant. Additionally, rules and permissions can be assigned to users in the Channel Customer tenant within an organization. Anything created in the Channel Customer tenant, such as a policy, user, role, or perspective, is only available in that particular tenant they were created in.

Tenant - Partner and Channel Customer

The Partner tenant is the platform configured for the partner with data, users, etc. unique to that partner. The Partner tenant also includes the Partner menu option on the left side panel that provides access to features specific to partners. The Channel Customer tenant is the platform configured for the Channel Customer with data, users, etc. unique to that Channel Customer. As the Partner Platform has a multi-tenant hierarchy, the Partner can switch between different Channel Customer tenants that have been created by that Partner.

Partner Generated Billing (PGB)

Partner Generated Billing is a bill creation engine to facilitate partners billing their end customers. This usually involves collecting a bill at the partner tenant level and creating individual bills (per Channel Customer) out of the original usage. In most cases, this includes common operations such as:

Assigning specific accounts within a Partner payer account to Channel Customers.
Applying billing rules or other cost modifications required by the partner to the Channel Customers’ bill.
Repricing or recalculating reservations based on account configuration and usage information.
Creating billing artifacts such as billing statements.
Applying custom costs.
Providing discounts.

Account Assignment Configuration

This is the mechanism within PGB where cloud accounts are assigned to a channel customer tenant by the partner.

Customer Classification

Tanzu CloudHealth tracks Channel Customers with direct access to the platform. Tracking helps the Tanzu CloudHealth Support Team to better understand how customers interact with the platform. Based on this knowledge, the support team can quickly allocate proper resources to incoming support questions and understand how to best address support requests.

When you configure a new customer, define the type of access a customer will receive. There are two types of access:

Managed: A Channel Customer tenant who has an established Tanzu CloudHealth environment but does not have login credentials to the platform. These Channel Customers may see reports from Tanzu CloudHealth as shared by the partner or have the generated billing data, but they do not have direct access to the platform.
Managed with Access: A Channel Customer tenant with direct login access to the Tanzu CloudHealth platform. This customer has either partial or full access to the platform and has been provided with at least one set of login credentials by the partner. To configure customer’s access, go to the Tanzu CloudHealth Partner platform and navigate to Partner > Customer > List. Select to edit the Customer tenant. Under Classification, select Managed with Access from the dropdown.

As a partner, if you want to change the customer tenant access to Managed (without access), make sure that the customer tenant has no users configured in it.

You can also change the access settings on the Customer page. To update the customer details on the Partner platform, navigate to Partner > Customers > List and click on the edit icon next to the Customer name. On the Customer page, click on the Classification dropdown to change the customer access settings.

Reporting in Partner Platform

Partners can leverage the following reporting features on Tanzu CloudHealth to gain insight into the historical and future cloud spend, improve the margin, and maintain the cloud environment’s health.

Custom Reports: Cost history and compute cost information for specific accounts and months.
Subscriptions: Schedule automatic delivery of standard or custom report on cost summary, health check pulse, security.
Policies: Rules to specify required operational state and monitor cost, availability, security, performance, and usage.
Perspectives: Framework to categorize assets within the infrastructure.
Custom Dashboards: High level insight into the Channel Customer environment.

For detailed information on how to set up and access these reports, refer to Reporting in Partner Platform.

Getting Started in the Partner Platform

Configuration instructions vary depending on how the customer purchases cloud service. However, getting started in the Partner Platform involves the following two steps:

Configuring your Cloud Accounts within the Partner Tenant
Setting up the customer tenant and assigning cloud accounts

For complete instructions on how to use Tanzu CloudHealth Partner platform for specific cloud providers, refer to the documentation listed below: