About connection of an Azure subscription
You can pay for usage of GitHub Enterprise Server features through Azure by connecting an Azure Subscription ID to your organization account on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance.
About billing through Azure
If you link your GitHub account to Azure, any usage-based costs starting from that point will be billed through Azure and charged on the 1st of each month. However, remaining GitHub charges, for example charges for your GitHub plan, will still be billed on your usual billing date.
For example, you link your Azure subscription to your organization account on June 16th and you also have a GitHub Copilot Business subscription. From that date onwards, any usage costs for Copilot Business will be included in your Azure bill and charged on July 1st. However, any charges incurred before June 16th for Copilot Business will be billed separately through GitHub on your account's usual billing date.
Prerequisites
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You must have an organization account on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance. For more information about the differences between these two types of accounts, see Types of GitHub accounts.
If the organization you want to connect an Azure subscription to belongs to an enterprise account, you must connect your Azure subscription to the enterprise account, not the organization.
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You must be an owner of the organization account. See
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You must be logged into Azure as a user who is able to provide tenant-wide admin consent, which is required to install GitHub's Subscription Permission Validation app on the Azure AD tenant. The app requires read access to display a list of available subscriptions, and is only used during this one-time process of connecting the Azure subscription. See Grant tenant-wide admin consent to an application in Microsoft Docs.
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Alternatively, before following the instructions in this article, users who are not able to provide tenant-wide admin consent can work with an Azure AD global administrator to configure an admin consent workflow. See User and admin consent in Azure Active Directory in Microsoft Docs.
Note
If your tenant provides user consent settings, users included in those settings might not require admin consent to install GitHub's Subscription Permission Validation app. See User consent in Microsoft Docs.
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To select an Azure subscription from the list of available subscriptions, the user must be an owner of the Azure subscription. See Assign a user as an administrator of an Azure subscription in Microsoft docs.
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You must know your Azure subscription ID. See Get subscription and tenant IDs in the Azure portal in the Microsoft Docs or contact Azure support.
Video demonstration of connecting a subscription
To connect an Azure subscription, you'll need appropriate access permissions on both GitHub Enterprise Server and the Azure billing portal. This may require coordination between two different people.
To see a demo of the process from beginning to end, see Billing GitHub consumption through an Azure subscription on GitHub's YouTube channel. This video demonstrates the process for an enterprise account. If you're connecting a subscription to an organization account, see Connecting your Azure subscription to your organization account.
Troubleshooting connection of an Azure subscription
You can troubleshoot some common issues with connection of an Azure subscription to your account on GitHub.
Message: "Need admin approval"
If the user account you used to sign into Azure does not have adequate permissions to install the app that GitHub uses to connect a subscription, you'll see a message with the following text.
Need admin approval
GitHub Inc needs permission to access resources in your organization that only an admin can grant. Please ask an admin to grant permission to this app before you can use it.
To avoid this message when you try again, you must either ensure that the Azure user can provide tenant-wide admin consent, or you must work with an Azure administrator to configure the admin consent workflow. For more information, review Prerequisites.