The consumption of Azure services and applications by customers is determined by comparing the consumption of Azure resources in the customer subscriptions created by co-deploying your solution where you can act as a partner. These associations and mappings within Microsoft's internal systems help you better control your software's use of Azure resources. For Azure offerings on a commercial platform, this tracking capability helps you align with Microsoft sales teams and receive credit for Microsoft Partner Programs. The customer service consumption definition does not apply to Azure VM offerings on a commercial platform. The trading platform publisher does not need to do anything to ensure that the consumption of virtual machine offerings in Azure is tracked in end customer subscriptions. For example, see here: https://microsoft.dataart.com/
Three deployment options are supported for customer service consumption tracking.
Azure Resource Manager templates (common routines for Azure applications, also referred to commercially as "solution templates" or "managed applications"): Partners create Resource Manager templates to define the infrastructure and configuration of their Azure solutions. The Resource Manager pattern allows customers to deploy your solution's resources in a consistent and repeatable manner.
Azure Resource Manager APIs: Partners can call Resource Manager APIs to deploy an Azure Resource Manager template or provide Azure services directly.
Terraform: With Terraform, partners can deploy Resource Manager templates or deploy Azure services directly.