The CloudMonitor Analytics Engine is the “smarts” and AI behind your cost insights. It extracts and analyzes your cost data and prepares it for reporting in Power BI. It is free to install from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and installs into one of your Azure Subscriptions.

This means that your cost data is processed by your infrastructure inside of your cloud tenancy - it never leaves!

Go to the Azure Marketplace to install the Analytics Engine. Note: you will need to sign in with your Microsoft work or school account: *(Right-click on the link)*<https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/data-drivenai1581501556049.cloudmonitor-analytics-engine>

Click **"Get It Now"** and sign in if required.

CloudMonitor offers pricing plans based on your cloud spend. We also provide a one-month trial period for you to try out the product

You can view our plans and pricing by checking out this link: <https://cloudmonitor.ai/pricing/>

Select your plan from the dropdown menu (1-Month Trial or Paid Plans) and click Continue.

1-Month Trial
LITE License: Monitor up to $100K USD of annual cloud spend
BASIC License: Monitor up to $250K USD of annual cloud spend
PROFESSIONAL License: Monitor up to $700K USD of annual cloud spend
ENTERPRISE License: Monitor up to $1.5M USD of annual cloud spend
ENTERPRISE License: Monitor up to $5M USD of annual cloud spend

Select the same plan you selected before and click on "Create". This will take you through a series of questions to personalise your installation.

You need to have an **Azure subscription with admin rights** to create Resource Groups and resources in order to proceed to the next step.

Choose an Azure Subscription in your environment where you would like to install CloudMonitor. This is NOT the Subscriptions that you want to monitor, just where you want to put the CloudMonitor Application. 

For example, if you are trialing it, you might install it on a DEV Subscription, whereas if you are monitoring production resources you might want to install it on a Production Subscription.

In our example below we are using a Subscription called "IE - MPN".

We recommend always creating a new Resource Group.

Enter "CloudMonitor" as the Resource Group name and click "OK" (We used "CloudMonitor-RG" in our example below).

Choose a Region where you want to install CloudMonitor. It makes sense to choose the region closest to your other Azure Subscriptions that you will be monitoring.

Fill in the Application Name as "CloudMonitor" or something similar and click on Next.

The Tags tab is for entering any tags required by your IT policy. This is an optional step although we highly recommend that you tag your resources. We'll skip over this to the Service Principal tab.

The next step is to create the Azure AD Service Principal that reads the cost metadata for the Azure Subscriptions that you want to monitor. You will need to have the permissions to create Service Principals in Active Directory, or you could ask your Admin to create it and provide you with the Client ID and Secret. We will assume you have the required permissions.

Choose **"Create new"** and click on **Change Selection.**

Enter a name like "CloudMonitor-SP" and make sure "**Accounts in this organizational directory only**" is selected, then click on **Register**.

Note: Please remember the name you selected for this Service Principal as you will need it later on.

Go to the Certificates & Secrets tab in the left -hand menu and click **"New client secret"**.

Fill in the "Description" field - we recommend something like "CloudMonitor Client Secret" and choose the amount of time that you want this secret to be valid for.

3 months is more secure but you will need to remember to change it when it expires or CloudMonitor will stop working. We **recommend 12 months** to avoid the effort of expiring secrets. **Click on "Add"** to proceed.

The next step is important. The VALUE is required and not the ID.

Click on the clipboard to copy the Secret Value and store it in a safe place, like a Password Vault. You will not be able to copy this value again once you close this window, and we need it for a later step.

Click "Create CloudMonitor Cost Analytics - FinOps on Autopilot" to go back to the installation wizard.

Download the CloudMonitor Analytics Engine in Azure