Create a Microsoft 365 Tenant

0:01In many parts of the world, there are these little, I guess, dolls that are quite popular in certain cultures and countries. So for example, in Japan, in China, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, they have these dolls that are very much like these. Now, this is just an AI-generated one, and I had it cut out the middle so you could kind of see that they're hollow in the middle. And of course, as you can guess, one of these dolls could fit inside of the other, which could fit inside of the other, which could fit inside of the other. Kind of looks like I'm part of this, but anyway.

0:33The reason why I bring up these Russia nesting dolls, as they're very frequently called, is because it kind of resembles the Microsoft Cloud Platform. You see, there are many interconnecting parts that kind of fit inside of one another or overlap one another that comprise the whole Microsoft Cloud Platform. Let's take a look at some of these constituent parts. One of those would be Azure itself. So it's kind of funny because the word Azure does not even appear in the MS-102 exam objectives, but we cannot escape it.

1:10You cannot do MS-102 without having Azure. You have to have it. It's an overarching umbrella that kind of encompasses everything else below those bullet points, okay? Everything else that we're gonna be getting to. For example, Azure hosts Entra ID, which we'll talk about next. Basically, Azure is Microsoft's Cloud Platform that is known as infrastructure. Oops, my pen's working weird. Infrastructure as a service, which is where you can have a variety of different infrastructure elements that we might normally have on-premises, but now they're in the cloud.

1:50So you can put your DNS, for example, in Azure. You can put networks in Azure, many other things. There's also the platform as a service. So you can have this interoperate with other things such as Kubernetes and other platforms where you're developing products or software or something like this. There's also Entra ID. In a lot of ways, Entra ID is really kind of the crux of Microsoft's cloud because it's so critical that you have a reliable and authenticatable, if I can say that word, identity provider.

2:26That's how we get authenticated. That's how your users will be able to gain access to anything in, well, basically anything on this whole slide. Entra ID basically supports Azure and Microsoft 365, which I just abbreviate as M365, okay? So Azure would be your big umbrella, and within that, you would have Entra ID, which would be our users, our groups, and so forth, okay? And then beyond that, we have Microsoft 365 or M365, and this will be backed by Entra ID.

3:02So Microsoft 365 is kind of a, I guess, another umbrella under here. And within that, we would have things that would be considered software as a service. So Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, which in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem is actually kind of one and the same, okay? Your users will have it surfaced as OneDrive, but in reality, especially when they're doing things like sharing documents in Teams or something like that, it's actually under the surface, it's actually SharePoint, okay?

3:37So SharePoint slash OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 apps, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Teams, all of the rest of that would be part of the Microsoft 365 umbrella. Now, the thing is, when you create a Microsoft 365 tenant, which is one of the things we'll be doing, actually probably do that in the next video, when you create that tenant, and that is one of the exam objectives for the MS-102, what it actually does is it also will automatically create an Azure tenant, and once you have an Azure tenant, it's also going to house within side of that or host Entra ID.

4:19So creating this creates in turn these other things as well. So you don't have to create them separately. Now, to be fair, I've really only created Azure tenants, which is also a way of creating both Entra ID and a Microsoft 365 tenant. That's how I usually do it. But since we're in the MS-102 and the emphasis is on Microsoft 365, we'll do it that way. Instead, we'll create in the next video a Microsoft 365 tenant.

0:00All right, now I want to point something out here, and that has to do with kind of what your objective or your background is with Microsoft 365. And that has to do with creating a tenant in the first place. Now, many of you probably already work for corporations where you have one or more tenants already in place. You probably didn't create them. They might've been there for years. In fact, Azure has been around, I think this is the 15th anniversary at the time of this recording here in March of 2026.

0:31It's been around for at least 15 years at the time of this recording. So you're very likely to have inherited something there, but you may also be someone who needs to create another tenant. Maybe you have a branch that has, or a subsidiary that needs to have its own management and its own M365 and its own Azure and all that stuff. Or you might just be a student. You might not have created any of that yet. You might not have worked in any of these environments quite yet. So you need to put hands on this stuff in order to really learn it. I'm telling you right now, you're gonna have to click through this stuff and navigate your way around.

1:05And by the way, in total, there are many hundreds of these different blades over here on the left and sub blades that break out into additional blades and all of this kind of stuff. We're not gonna investigate all of that right now. But these over on the left, anything on the left is usually called a blade. Anything within this section over here where there are options up at the top, those are normally called tabs. Even though they don't really look like tabs to me, that's what they call them.

1:37Now, what I'm showing you here is a pre-existing M365 tenant, okay? And it also has an associated Entra ID tenant and an Azure tenant. Really, I don't think Entra ID is a tenant on its own. It's contained within, though, an Azure tenant. Okay, so that having been said, the reason why I'm bringing that up is because, again, if you're from a corporation or something like that, or you need to create an additional M365 tenant slash Azure tenant, well, how do you do that?

2:09And how do you keep it all straight, so to speak? That can be a real point of confusion. And I'll admit, I've been confused myself in the past there because you can use a single account to create multiple tenants, all right? So if I'm using a personal account, which Microsoft calls an MSA account, I don't know where the S comes from, Microsoft, I guess, the S in Microsoft. So MS and then A is the account, and that could be just a personal account.

2:39And you might have one of those created at your company just for sake of being kind of a central junction for all of your tenants that you would then create. This could be an Outlook.com, Outlook, you know, what am I trying to say? Hotmail, Gmail, probably most of us are using Gmail or something like that, or a live account, okay? So it can also be just a personal Microsoft account that you create, even Yahoo or maybe an AOL account. Are those still around, I guess? Anyway, if you're someone like me or someone who's a student and you're learning all of this stuff, I've created multiple tenants in the past and you can do it with a single email account.

3:22So if we take a look at my little icon up here in, what am I in? Chrome, I'm in Google Chrome, but it doesn't really matter the browser. You can see I'm logged in here as jamescbta.gmail.com. And this is a tenant that I created for the last Quartus I taught, which I guess was the AZ800. And I've also used it for the, I think the AB900. So I've used it a lot of different places. It's already got users here. If I look at my active users, you can see a list of users that I've used at various points in the past.

3:54We've got some subscriptions already active, stuff like that. But in my objective, what I need to do is to create a new tenant so I can show you how that's all done. So I just went into incognito mode, okay? And for that, I'm just going to go to signup.microsoft.com and press enter. And this is where we get started. You do want to make sure that you go over here. We're not going to do this for personal use. It would give us very limited resources and does not mirror what we need to know for the MS102. What we'll do instead is to go to for work or school.

4:27And in particular, we're going to sign up for Microsoft 365. And again, it kind of doesn't matter which one you choose. You could choose that or you could choose Azure. That's the one I've usually done in the past, but one will create the other plus enter ID. As I mentioned previously, I'm going to sign up for Microsoft 365 here. And then once we do that, we see a few different options for individuals, which we don't want, for business, which we do want, that's the one we're going to be selecting. There's also for enterprise, we probably kind of sort of could do that one as well.

4:59In fact, actually we could, because they both go to the same creative path, a creation path. It takes us to the same route to create the tenant. And then there's this one for education, which is very, very similar to these other two. It's just that it's for educational institutions. So if you're in an educational institution, like a university, something like that, someone probably went to this for education one. The significance of that though, is the trials are different. So for education, they have different licensing products that you would use to assign to your users and stuff like that.

5:34They have a little bit different pricing, but the functionality is mostly the same, okay? So if you're in an educational environment, just about everything I show you here will still be effective for you as well, but I'm going to go to for business. Of course, Microsoft wants me to use browser, the Edge browser, as you can see up at the top, I'm going to say no thanks. And I'm also going to go up here to the top where it says try for free. And again, if you're a student or if you're in an existing enterprise and you want to have a tenant that you can kind of play around with, so to speak, without affecting your production, that's what you want to do.

6:12I strongly recommend, I think for obvious reasons, that you don't fiddle around with your production environment, okay? Because you don't want to mess something up here. So I'll try for free. Again, I'll click try for free. There's also a version without teams. I'm not going to get into a lot of detail with that, but the reason why there's one without teams, and I don't have all the data on this, the legal data, but in the European Union, they kind of objected to the fact that Microsoft would have you sign up for all of this and automatically package together with it, Microsoft Teams.

6:46So over there, you can do it without Teams. And then if you want Teams, you have to pay extra for it. It has to be licensed separately. So I guess that's the silver lining for Microsoft. They get more licensing fees. Anyway, I'm going to try for free over here on the left. In recent, I guess past year or two, they have now included also this ask Microsoft thing over here, which is really kind of a AI driven thing to guide you through this if you want. And as we can see here, again, we get to try this for free for one month.

7:19And I will point out many times you can extend that for a lot of the licenses that you'll see within this, once we're done creating everything, there will be a link that says extend or word to that effect, extend for one month. I can't remember how it is, but it's obvious. And you'll then be able to extend it. You can choose the length of your subscription. Usually there is a discount if you do it for a year, as opposed to monthly. I'm going to choose one month in my particular case. And so we'll be billed monthly after the subscription trial has run out.

7:53Oh, I didn't specify how many people I want. You can go up to 25 free users. So I could start with that. I just have to be very cognizant of this because if I don't extend my trial, then after a month, which I think would be April 9th at the time of this recording, which I'll be on vacation then. So we'll have to really remember to end or extend this trial by April 9th. Yeah, it says it right down at the bottom, April 9th. Then I'm going to start getting billed. Okay, if I have 25 users, then it's going to bill me $375, okay?

8:28So what I should probably do before April 9th, maybe April 7th or 8th, while I'm at Disney World with my family and my grandson, hopefully between rides, I'll remember to make changes here. Definitely set up a reminder for yourself. That is one of the risks, and I'll probably get into this later too. But especially if you're a small shop, you're a learner, you don't really have a corporation that covers the expenses for you and stuff like that, you can really get smacked with Microsoft billing. Sometimes it's quite opaque.

8:59And I would say something that you have to be very precautious about. You can set up alerts, budgets, various limiters to help prevent you from getting charged way more than you would have expected, but you do have to keep an eye on it. Anyway, as we scroll down, we'll see some more features here. Business standard trial, we get 25 users, as it says. We get all the same features as the paid product. We do have to enter in a credit card for future billing so that when comes time, April 9th, or whatever the date is for you, they will be able to charge you.

9:33But we can get started with all of these kinds of things. In other words, all of these products that you would normally expect to qualify as Microsoft Office, so to speak. That's not the official term they use anymore. They don't say Office 365. It's just Microsoft 365, which includes these products. So anyway, I'm gonna go up here and click on Next. I've gotta enter my email in here. Okay, so that's what I'm using. And as I hit Next, it tells me that the verification is complete.

10:05I'll set up my account and enter in all the stuff you would normally expect to see in such a form. I won't bore you with all those details. So once I'm done, I'll click onto the next page. All right, so I entered in the CBT Nuggets physical address and some other pertinent information like the phone number. Then I have to enter in here a password. Doesn't really tell you what the requirements are, but I've entered those in there. It's also going to create this account. So here's the thing. So remember what I told you, I am jamescbt8 at gmail.com, but that's not the account I use to sign in with, okay?

10:42That's not the account that I use to administer everything that I'm gonna be showing you in this course. What's gonna happen instead is they, Microsoft creates this for me. It's called just James Conrad app, and they kind of randomly put, I guess, in there cbtnuggets713.onmicrosoft.com. I'm gonna shorten that just because I'm lazy. It's a little less typing. And I'm gonna go ahead and save that. Hopefully it lets me. That's only gonna be possible if no one else has already chosen that. I can't imagine anyone else would, except for one of my coworkers, which they haven't apparently.

11:14So I think we're ready to go here. Click on next. And then of course I'll enter in my credit card and all the rest of it. And once we're done with that, I will click on through, and then we'll go ahead and check this box right here. Again, agreeing that they can charge me $375. Okay, a little pro tip for you here as well. I have a few different credit cards, probably too many. And I chose the one with the lowest credit limit that I just reserved for only things like this.

11:46So I don't get runaway charges of $3,000 or something like that, okay. I would not recommend using a debit card that connects to something like your personal checking account. Because again, if something got away from you and it happens, you know, human errors occur, or we go on vacation to Disney World and we forget, I wouldn't want those charges to come back and smack you. Okay, so just be aware of it. Here it says they're adding products to my account, and this will take a minute. So I'll resume recording once that's been completed. All right, it looks like it's gone ahead and confirmed here.

12:19So I've got an order number. I'm gonna get an email at that email address with that order confirmation. And this is something you're gonna need to do anyway. You should start using multi-factor authentication. That gives you an added layer of security for this new account. And you don't have to technically use Microsoft Authenticator, but I use that even though I've got Google Authenticator and a couple of others. I just use the Microsoft Authenticator just to keep it as consistent as possible within the Microsoft ecosystem.

12:49So I'll click on Next. And after I've entered in the password, I'll go ahead and sign in. Here's where they want us to use the Authenticator app, which I have it on my trusty little phone right here. I'll click on Next, and I'll take off to scan the code. So let me open up the Authenticator here. So I've got Microsoft Authenticator open on my phone. I'll go ahead and click Next. I'll set up my account in the app and click on Next. And here's where I'll scan that code. Scanning it right now on my phone, hit Next. And then on my phone, I don't know if you'll be able to see this or not, but it shows a prompt here to enter in the same number we see on the screen.

13:24So I'm entering in the number 82. And yes, in answer to, are you trying to sign in? Then it provides that email or that account that I just created. I'll click on Yes. And we now see that we are done. So two-factor authentication, and in particular using something like the Microsoft Authenticator, is a pretty key part of security to all of Microsoft's ecosystem right now. So I would get used to that if you're not used to that quite yet. Do I wanna stay signed in? I'm gonna go ahead and say yes, although it really won't matter because I'm in an incognito mode right now.

13:59I'll say yes anyway, because that's what my normal habit will be when I am on this. Okay, it's at this point that I can start to create or use this Microsoft 365 Business Standard trial. And then here we are, it takes me to this page. And it gives you a little bit of introductory stuff. I'm just gonna check everything. All of those things are important to me. I'm gonna say I'm new to this only because I want it to be able to provide as many prompts that you might also see, and I'll click on Submit. All right, in the next video, I'll show you some essential things that you can use to help get you started and to manage billing, which again, can be something to be very precautious about.

0:00All right, so let's take a look around, shall we? One of the first things we're going to really need to do is to make sure we have the licensing that we need. And for that, I recommend that you go down here to Billing on the left blade over here, right where it says Billing, and then we click there and go to Your Products. Now you can see here that I've already got two products for free. One of those is the Business Standard, that's just the trial. And then there's EntraID Free, that's just part of the package, right? Now, one thing I'm really missing here in order to demonstrate probably all of the things we need to do would be the Microsoft 365 E5 license.

0:40I say that very distinctly to make it very clear that you do not want the Microsoft Office 365 E5 license. That's a different license. Microsoft has made things very confusing because, first of all, they don't even call it Office anymore, but for the license, they still refer to it as Office. This is going to be the kind of common products you're probably used to in the past that would include PowerPoint, Word, Excel, all that stuff.

1:12However, all those traditional Office, quote unquote, products, are included in a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license. I want to go with E5 because it's also going to include Defender XDR, which we're going to need for this course, and probably among other things, okay? Anyway, that's probably the most full-featured package you can get for our purposes, okay? So we don't have it. How do we get it? We're going to click on Add More Products right here.

1:42Once we click here, I'm going to scroll down, and we can see this is the E3 license. And we can see there, right up above my head, Microsoft 365 E5, Trial Available. Sometimes that does not appear. I honestly cannot figure out Microsoft's secret sauce. You kind of have to go through quite a lot of click-through in order to get this sometimes. Sometimes you might just have to go right to the billing page and just pay for it outright.

2:17But anyway, here it looks like it's going to be available, so I'm going to click on Details here. And this is where it looks as if I have to pay for the whole thing right up from the get. Okay, I got to choose a month, a year, three years, monthly, yearly, whatever, how many licenses I want. And this is going to be more than $60, by the way, because it's also going to have taxes added onto that. Oh, actually, it shows us down here. 6840 per license per month, okay, if we do it a month.

2:48Anyway, what we also have, though, is this right here, Microsoft 365 E5 Trial. Yes, I want Teams, so I'm not going to choose these options down here. So I'm going to choose that option right there. I'm going to get 25 in my free trial, and I'll just click on Next. Just in case I'm going to hedge my bets a little bit, I'm going to set a reminder to cancel this before I start getting billed for it, especially for 25 users at more than $60 per license.

3:20I can't do the math. Let me see what that would add up to. That's $1,500 in a month, people. I'll have to make sure my wife increases my allowance if I'm going to pay for all of that. So I'm going to just do this by month down here, and to hedge my bet, I'm also going to put in probably four licenses. I could probably get away with that if I did accidentally get charged. By the way, I will say this too. If you contact Microsoft Support, they're usually pretty good about refunding accidental charges.

3:51If you do that time and time again, they might start to look at you sideways, but I've had a mishap or two, and they've been pretty gracious about that. The only other thing I would say about that is if you're on a trial license, a trial membership, you're at the bottom of their priorities for support and everything. So for example, some things we'll set up, and you'll see this as we go. It might take a few hours before they're actually activated, but if you're a paying customer, you get more compute resources, more processing resources from Microsoft to enable your products, and so it's going to be a little bit snappier if you're a paying customer.

4:33Anyway, I'll choose update to the number four licenses, and if I did have a mishap here, I'd get charged $273. Actually, I'm going to try to extend it first. Usually you can, and I think we're ready to go. This is also one of those places I do recommend you read all the fine print, because it will tell you about your billing frequency, refunds, all that sort of thing, so I'm going to go ahead and place the order now. Now, I'm going to go ahead and assign the licenses a little bit later. We can cover that separately, but at least I've got the licenses now, so I'm going to go ahead and close that and go back to my products just to make sure that it shows up.

5:10Sometimes you have to hit refresh. I do find that with a lot of the UIs here. Oh, here it did actually show up just fine. It does say that it's pending. I'm not sure why that might be because I haven't assigned it to anybody yet or it just has to go through Microsoft's process on the backend, but while we're here, I will click on that, and I want to show you, here is where you can extend the trial date. I have noticed that when you do that, if you do that too prematurely, like if I do that right now, for some reason, it still shows me the expiration date of only 30 days from now.

5:44So I try not to click that just in case until I'm a lot closer to 4-10-26. So I might click on that link right there, maybe on the ninth or the eighth or something. Now, the next thing I do, you may also prefer this. A lot of people like this, is to enable dark mode. This is just blinding to me to be all brilliant white all the time. So I'm gonna go to dark mode and my eyes are already thanking me, except for this big light I have here to light myself.

6:16And here we go. We should be in good shape now to proceed with the next video.

0:01All right, so this is where we left off last time. Remember, the subscriptions, I don't mean to scare you about Microsoft too much, but the subscriptions can get away from you. So I'm gonna show you how to help manage those expenses. Now, also for an individual learner, like you might be, or for someone like me, who's a trainer, who really only works with a few test accounts here and there and shows people how to do this kind of thing, the expenses can be quite high. However, on a corporate level, you might, like, I think it was two or three months ago, I had a 500 and some dollar expense because I was enabling certain features that I had to demonstrate for a previous course.

0:42Now, for just me and a few sample accounts, that was quite expensive. However, in the corporation, that would have potentially only been a 50 cents per user or something, okay? Depending upon the size of your organization. So it scales out economically for what you get for it. But in a smaller basis or a test or trial or a training basis, that can be a little expensive. So let's take a look at how to manage those sorts of things. So here we are down, I'm in the same place, I'm gonna actually go to the beginning.

1:16So I'm gonna go right to the top here, Microsoft 365 Admin Center. And you can see here that the URL is out admin.cloud.microsoft. And this is just the homepage for that, okay? The homepage. So now we'll go down here to billing over on the left, the billing blade. Again, we were just at the products. This is where we saw that I do have, let me kill this stuff. The Microsoft 365 E5 account. Oh, it says it's active now. Earlier, it showed that it was pending. So I guess we're good there. And then we go down here to billing accounts over on the left, and we can see we have this one billing account.

1:53You may have more than one billing account. And this again can be especially the case if you have, oh, subsidiaries or different divisions, or you manage expenses separately between your tenants. Okay, I'm gonna zoom in a little bit too so we can see more clearly. All right, now let's go to controlling these expenses, which again, you gotta watch out for. So I'm gonna go to bills and payments. Right now I can see I have two invoices at $0. I'm willing to accept it. But as you can see right now, these are just my free trials.

2:26I'm pretty sure is what these are. If you click on one of those, it can show you a little bit more detail. But again, there's nothing really to see here right now. But what we wanna do is to control our expenses. So I'm gonna go down to cost management down here. And oh, as soon as I get here, I realize we have to do something else first, okay? We don't actually have Azure quite yet. I mean, we do and we don't. Let me explain what I mean by that. Remember I told you earlier that Azure is kind of created in conjunction with generating a Microsoft 365 tenant.

3:01The bones are there, but there's no meat on those bones yet. So what we'll need to do is to go to Azure. All right, now the next thing I wanna show you though, as a quick tangent, is this little icon up here. Okay, you see that right there? Normally you will not see that. I'm running Google Chrome. And in Google Chrome, you can get an extension called Centro 365. This is not a Microsoft product. It's from Sean O'Sullivan. He's created this and it's very handy.

3:31Let me show you what I mean. Remember that icon I was just talking about? Well, there's a lot of admin consoles to go through in Microsoft's cloud ecosystem. And it's kind of hard to always remember which one's which, and then you gotta bookmark everything and all that stuff. So what I do here is I just click there. And that will just take you to all of the major items, okay? Microsoft 365, which is where we are right now. There's 365 apps, such as, you know, the Microsoft quote-unquote office types of apps.

4:01Lighthouse, Azure Portal, Defender XDR, we'll be getting into that in this course. Here's Entra ID, which we'll also be getting into. But what I need to do right now is to go to the Azure Portal. So I'm gonna go right there. And again, it's here. I've logged into it. You know, I'm gonna not go on a tour right now, but I just don't have anything to do with it yet, okay? It's just the framework is here. So I'm gonna go down here to Start. And again, we get a free trial. Fortunately, this does have $200 of free credit towards Azure products, such as virtual machines.

4:37So I'm gonna click on Start there. Try Azure for free. I'm gonna go to my account here. I've got a couple of different ones that look very similar. The one we'll be working with in this course is jamesconrad at cbtnuggets7.onmicrosoft.com. So I'm gonna agree to the agreements. I have no idea what I just clicked on, but that's okay. I can't proceed unless I click on Next after selecting them. Verification completes. And I will click on Next to continue.

5:07I'll go ahead and sign up. Again, I do have multi-factor authentication in place. And this is a delightful message. I am not eligible for an Azure free account. Why would that be? Well, very likely it's because, again, since I'm an educator, I sign up for a lot of free trials and all that stuff. I've probably exceeded some threshold, okay? I've gotten, I can't even count how many free Azure accounts. So I'm gonna have to just go with pay as you go pricing. You though, again, if this is your first time doing this, or if you haven't done it a lot, you're probably gonna be fine with getting the free one, free trial, as well as the free trial, as well as the $200 in free services.

5:49I also have to select, by the way, if I'm gonna pay for it, like I'm gonna have to do, what kind of support that I want. And you can kind of look at those on your own if you want to. I'm gonna do the no technical support option because I'm a cheapskate and I don't wanna pay the $29 a month. I may regret that. But anyway, that's what I'm gonna select, sign up for it. Again, it gives me a warning about making sure I have two-factor authentication or multi-factor authentication. And it's gonna go ahead and confirm and create the account. Now, one thing I do wish it would tell me is why specifically I was not eligible for a free account.

6:25I'm gonna continue the sign-in process here. Kind of hurts my feelings a little bit that I got rejected, but that's Microsoft. Okay, so anyway, I'm gonna go ahead and click on start to navigate the portal. I don't really need to do all that. This is all quick start stuff and gives you kind of some free tutorials and stuff like that. I'm just gonna actually get to go home. Okay, and here we are. Once again, I can choose dark mode here as well. You don't do it in the same way though. You gotta click the little gear icon up here and then I'll go to appearance and switch to dark mode.

7:02Okay, there we go. Now, once we're here, now I can go to subscriptions. Your top row of little icons that you see up here will look different for you than it will for me because it usually shows what you've used most frequently. If you don't see what you need, almost always I'll just search for it. So I'll just go to subscriptions like this and this is where I can start to manage the expenses and that can be done right here under Azure. So you can go to cost analysis if you have ongoing charges.

7:32I shouldn't have much if anything yet because I just created this. Then I can go to cost alerts. I definitely recommend you go there. I'm gonna add an alert for my CBT Nuggets billing account. I'm selecting that billing account now and I'm gonna click on add. I'll select the type of an alert. You can actually do a couple of different types. One of those would be just an anomaly. This is where, I don't know if they use AI or other kind of metrics to determine this, but if you get a spike in charges for some unknown reason, like the last time I got one, I think I had a couple of virtual machines, which can be set up to automatically shut down at certain times.

8:10Again, especially useful if you're doing demos or training or something like that because you don't want them running 24 seven because they'll contribute to your charges. Well, I accidentally left a couple of those going and it noticed that I normally don't do that. So it noticed that I was racking up a little bit of charges. It was only like a couple of bucks, so it wasn't that bad. So that's one of the things you can set up. You can also go to budgets down here and you might find that this is very useful as well. So I'll click on add and enter a unique name.

8:41I'll just call this, you know, Budget Buster and it resets every month. This will be from March 1st. And again, it'll reset every month. For some reason, they give you an expiration. I would think you might want these to run continually, but maybe they want you to reevaluate in a couple of years to see if this is what you still want. So my budget threshold, I'll put 200 bucks. Oops, I put 2000. No wonder I have budget problems. So I put $200 in there and there's nothing to display yet because we haven't been charged anything, but I'll click on next.

9:12And then I enter in alerts. These are very useful. So I'll say actual cost. When the actual cost reaches 50% of my total budget, so in other words, at $100, it'll send me an alert. Likewise, I'll say actual cost, I'll even do a 100%. When it gets to my budget, I put $200, I'll get another alert. And then I can say, I also wanna know when it gets forecasted. So when I get to, let's say 75% of my forecast, which would be $150, again, I want to be notified about that and it will also send an email to me.

9:49By the way, that's another thing I should point out. You can set up additional emails for it to send to. So for example, the email that I log on with here, I hardly ever use it. So I want it to go to a more production email account that I monitor regularly. And then, oh, I click on save and it gave me an error. Oh, because I didn't put an email address in. As much as anything, this is actually a UI issue because it looks like I'm seeing the whole page here, but I'm really not.

10:20You gotta, Microsoft sometimes has scroll bars within scroll bars within scroll bars. And this one's not terrible as bad as some I've seen, but down below, there's a place for an email, okay? So I gotta go down here and I should also point this out. This is beyond our scope for now, but there's this manage action group. If you want to get very elaborate with this, you can have an action group that does other things as well, such as trigger certain actions or a sequence of actions that you want to take place, for example.

10:51But anyway, that's all we're gonna do for there. I'm just gonna enter an email address here. Once I'm done with that, I think that's it. I should be able to click on save. So let me enter that in and you can enter in more than one if you want to, which might be a good idea in case someone's on vacation or taking their grandkids to Disney World. Okay, that's it, I guess, right? Yeah, so now we've got it done. There's all of our stuff that we want to be notified about. And now there's my budget, okay? Now I can also go over here. They're very similar. So notice there's also cost alerts.

11:23Well, isn't that kind of what this is that I just created? It's a little bit different. So cost alerts, if we look at this, I can click on add right here, and this will give me an alert type of an anomaly. There's actually another one here as well, but it's not part of our subscription. It's a different type of a subscription for enterprise agreements. So ours is an anomaly, and this would do an anomaly by resource group. So a resource group, just think of that as a bucket in which you put all of the resources that you need for something, right?

11:56So it could be for virtual machines, a database, storage, networking, all that kind of stuff, okay? Anyway, it will notify you if it notices something that's out of the ordinary for what you normally do. And it just occurred to me that I got one of these not too long ago, 16 hours ago, apparently, because in a previous tenant, it's a different tenant than the one we're looking at here for this course, I had some virtual machines running, and I guess I forgot to shut one of them down or something like that.

12:28So that's what it gave me, said an anomaly alert. An unusual cost increase was detected, and I thought it was in here. Oh, there it is, look. 276% increase compared to the expected range. Well, that's really as severe as it sounds, because all I did was set up a virtual machine, and I forgot to shut it down, okay? Now, you can set up virtual machines. This is just for another day, but you can set up virtual machines to automatically turn off at a certain point in time, like every night at, I don't know, midnight or something like that.

13:04And again, that's especially useful for lab machines, tests, something like that, something you don't need continuous service from. Anyway, I should show it down here. Yeah, and it cost me, it was this virtual machine right here, VM2, 92% of the total and the cost change percentage there. So that was kind of nice to have. Even though it looks a little bit scary right at first, it wasn't as bad as I thought once I actually looked at the expense. It wasn't that big a deal. So anyway, there it is. There's all some of the criteria that I would have.

13:35I would start on a certain day. I can finish it. It looks like it'll be a year for this particular alert. Again, I don't know why Microsoft insists on putting some expiration on these other than the expectation that businesses change, the way you do things change. And so you might need to review this periodically. Then I'll go ahead and click on Create. And there we go. If I click on Refresh, hopefully it comes up. Oh, I don't have any alerts because I just got started. So there's no expenses yet.

14:06So that's why it's not showing me anything. So anyway, that should get you started. We now have a tenant. We've got Azure spun up. We've got cost management worked out. We've got cost alerts and budgets going on. And that is something I would, again, would recommend you set up right at the get so that you don't get caught short on your expectations there and get unexpected charges.

0:00All right, so up above, you saw that we went ahead and created a tenant. We created a Microsoft 365 tenant. It kind of set up the scaffolding for an Azure tenant, but we still had to also go in there and kind of configure some basics with it in order to get it operational. Now, I do want to point out again, you could have also created the Azure tenant first, and it would have then auto-created the Microsoft 365 tenant, okay? So there's kind of that interrelation between the two of them, and either way you go, we'll create an intra-ID for you as well, okay?

0:33Now, the other thing I want to point out, though, just briefly here, is an alternative to that, and that would be to use Microsoft's Microsoft 365 Developer Program that you see here, and which will be linked down below. So if you have this option, I do recommend it, because this will give you kind of a pre-packaged, in-situ environment, a corporate environment. It's a fictional company, and it already has emails that have been sent, Teams chats that have already been started, conversations that are already there, user accounts that are already in intra-ID.

1:09All of that stuff is pre-configured for you, and it gives you the opportunity to work with kind of a real company, so to speak, even though it's all fictional. But the reason why I say real is because it already has emails and everything, messages, everything that's already been done, and it gives you a good environment in which to test certain security measures, purview, I don't know, data loss prevention, some other things. Some of that's beyond our scope in this course, but it's still very, very useful.

1:41So we used to use it here at CBT Nuggets. We can't use it for various reasons now, but I do want to recommend it to you so that you can take advantage of it. And this is really what it's about down here, the Microsoft 365 E5 developer subscription. That's the one that you can use, and it does, by the way, include free subscriptions to Microsoft 365 E5. I think purview is in there as well. Some other, it's really full-featured. It's got really everything you would need to test out an environment.

2:14And for that reason, I strongly recommend it. If you're eligible, there is some stuff about who can qualify for this, but it's well worth applying for and standing up one of these free environments.