Administering Azure DevOps Services

In my opinion, this is a must. The logic is simple, you identify inactive users and either remove them or assign them a free Stakeholder license, and save money. Tip 1 : There are several options from which you can choose to run the automation, below are some of them: As a script that you run manually. Automate using Azure Pipelines Automate using Azure Functions Here is one of the approaches we are following, which makes use of Rest APIs for Azure DevOps and Azure Functions. This is a graceful approach where the users will be notified about their license getting downgraded. They will also have the choice to login to ADO within a specified time to retain their license. The Axure Function is timer triggered - you can choose to keep the "notifying the users" logic and "removal" logic in the same function or separate functions. During the notification flow: Get the list of users using ADO Rest API, and find the list of us...

User licenses contribute to a major share of the cost for Azure DevOps services. In this post we will focus mainly on user licenses and some tips for managing them efficiently. Managing the cost associated with other paid services for Azure DevOps will be covered in a separate post. If you are part of the Azure DevOps admin team of your organization, you should be having an idea about the monthly / annual spend for Azure DevOps. The user who sets up billing for Azure DevOps services needs to have permissions at the subscription level, as explained in this article -  Add a user who can set up billing for Azure DevOps . Often what happens is, setting up billing for Azure DevOps is done by someone who has more privileges in Azure - like a subscription admin. However once the subscription is linked, an ADO collection admin can then add people and assign them licenses.  It is also possible that the ADO admin doesn't get a copy of the bill, thereby blocking the visibili...

What is Azure DevOps? Here is an extract from the article that I had written earlier -  Azure vs DevOps vs Azure DevOps : Azure DevOps is a tool that offers the different practices in a DevOps workflow as services. You can choose to use all or any of these services in your application's life cycle. Azure DevOps evolved from Team Foundation Server, which was at one point, an on-premise only solution. Microsoft is now offering this product as a cloud service as well, which was earlier named VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services), and was later rebranded to Azure DevOps Services. The server version is now called Azure DevOps Server. The services offered include: Azure Boards - for planning and tracking. This is where you would create backlogs, do capacity planning, infer reports like velocity and burn down. Azure Pipelines - for creating CI / CD workflows. Create pipelines for automated builds and deployments. This is platform, language and cloud in...