Improvements to Cost estimator

I second the motion (in general) - however, in my experience I find that the NMM Calculator covers the 80/20 rule (covers 80% and leaves behind 20% for the edge or special cases).  And while it may not be obvious, there are ways to cover the vast majority of these items, just not necessarily natively.     Some feedback in general that I've provided in various occasions on the past, and seemed appropriate here at this point.

The Azure Pricing Calculator is only helpful for specific information for me, My biggest long standing gripe is that while it does a good job capturing all of the possible inputs that affect the resulting price, it doesn't break the results down into manageable pieces to be manipulated as necessary.    An example is pricing a virtual machine with various sized disks, even if you can get it in the same row, the result is a single row containing all of the various pieces in semi readable format.    Instead of a row for compute, a row for disks, a row for snapshots… etc.   So I cannot say I would look forward to an output of the Azure Pricing Calculator.    Rest assured, NMM is pulling from the Microsoft API's though, which in theory should be where the Azure Pricing Calculator pulls from.

Server Quantities?   I use the “new server” button which creates a new machine with exactly the same spec's as the last machine.   Takes a little getting used to, but similar spec'd machines it helps nicely.

Server and ASR - I've asked for this some time ago, but I suspect not -enough- partners ask for it, in order to get it prioritized.  The challenge in my mind (if I an a developer for this) is how to safely estimate the bandwidth and storage operations, given the inputs provided.

Backups - Concur, it would be helpful to include the enhanced backup policy types as an option.  Again though, depending on the level of churn, this can be challenging to accurately predict without good source data.  ‘Normal’ use cases it isn't going to change much, but there is always going to be ‘that’ customer who bucks the status quo.

S2S VPN's - I can agree with that, being able to put a connection quantity in (so that if it exceeds the base included, it adds on to cost)

All collected though, I think it would be valuable, if the Product Team wants to do some expansion here to poll MSP's to see what kind of infrastructure solutions (Beyond AVD) they are building, and then see how to accurately help architect/quote the costs accordingly.    Everyone is doing something a little bit different, and Nerdio is challenged with meeting in the middle.

Great suggestions! Keep them coming. 😎

We have a number of Cost Estimator Improvement suggestions and this ties in great with those.
However, as a generally rule, our Cost Estimator is meant to be an easy-to-use calculator that makes it easy to quote a customer. If we make it too complicated (like you mentioned on the UI idea), it can impact the ease of use.

John provided great insight on your suggestions as well but let me chime-in as well to see if that helps clarify. 🙂
 

Azure Pricing Calculator

Generating that will be a bit hard to do since we're not using the website to create our Cost Estimates. 
We're using the same underlying API but also make some assumptions that the Azure Pricing Calculator doesn't. Out of curiosity, are you looking for the Azure Pricing Calculator to have a quick comparison as to what it would cost if Nerdio calculated vs native Azure?

Servers

Like John mentioned, when you click the “Add Server” button, it clones the previous line. This can be good if you're adding servers in order, but if you're going through and want to clone your 3rd server in a list of 20 servers, it's a bit more work.
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) will be a bit difficult to calculate, but likely not impossible. If we go off what is currently on the estimate, and you choose the destination region/replication settings, we could probably do that without too much effort
Do you find yourself quoting/implementing ASR for all of your customers as part of the Cloud Adoption Framework?

Backups

Very good point. VM backups are treated differently than Profile Backups and likely need to be quoted differently.
Are you thinking of adding a checkbox to the different areas in the estimate to choose if it's part of the Basic or Enhanced backup? 🤔

Site-to-Site VPN

Adding a Quantity shouldn't be too hard, but Egress/Ingress may be a bit more difficult if you have multiple branch offices with different bandwidth requirements.

Misc. Other Changes

The rest of your suggestions seem like they might be common items to add regularly to your estimates but want to make it so it's easy to add.
Maybe if we introduce “Other Items” where you can create a list of additional items you frequently add to a quote, but aren't included in the default estimate, it can pull that item and then get the latest cost for that item from the API.
Do you think that'd do what you're wanting on that or am I completely off-base?

Yes John, you are 100% right, it's difficult to find the balance between everyones use cases. It would be great to seperate the cost estimator. E.g. Standard and then a secondary one for detailed. That way anyone with additional requirements or are trying to follow CAF for example can use the advanced. Prior to the latest changes, I had altogether stopped using cost estimator and went back to the Azure calc as it was more accurate. Nerdio was coming in too cheap which is worse that coming out more expensive! 

I am after the azure calc as we often claim Microsoft funding. One of the things we must submit for our proof of execution is the azure calc output as it allows MSFT to know which funding pot the customer falls into.

ASR is typically based on the customer. Mostly, we find we are doing Zonal ASR and we can estimate by doing the fixed cost per VM and then essentially double the storage costs. With it only being zonal, SHs aren't included in ASR as there is some zonal redundancy built in by using different AZs. In the event of an incident, we'd simply spin up more session hosts in available zones if nerdio auto-scale doesn't pick this up. The LOB app servers are the things we typically want to ASR. This method isn't perfect but is a combination of cost saving whilst still “keeping the lights on”. 

For backups, it's aligning it more to the Azure Calc. An idea could be defining the standard policy and enhanced policy at the top and then for each resource, picking if you want the standard or enhanced. The alternative route is exactly how MSFT do it.  

For VPNs, it'd be again a case of aligning to Azure Calc, so just asking how many is required and whats the total bandwidth required over a course of the month. Same applies to NAT GW and FW. 

Yess the other items is a great idea. The typical things are: DNS Zones (Part of Landing zone),  Private endpoints, Vault, Gold Image + Nerdio Snapshotting images, ADDS NAT gateway + LB (when Entra DS in use), Public IPs etc. 

I know I have raised quite a few so happy to have a call on all of them as it might be quicker rather than written back and forth!