This page is a practical guide for running the Region Selection Toolkit, helping you evaluate and choose the optimal Azure region for your workloads.

Before proceeding with this Step by Step Guide, make sure you’ve completed the prerequisites and initial setup in Getting Started

Once your environment is ready and you have determined the input method, follow these steps to run the Region Selection Toolkit. It’s important to run the stages in order, as each stage uses data from the previous one. The steps below assume you’re using PowerShell:

Open a PowerShell prompt in the toolkit’s directory. If you’re in Azure Cloud Shell, you can navigate to the folder where you cloned the toolkit.

• Log in to Azure: Run the following to authenticate to Azure

Connect-AzAccount

Navigate to the 1-Collect folder and run the script Get-AzureServices.ps1 to collect the Azure resource inventory and properties, for yor relevant scope (resource group, subscription or multiple subscriptions). The below example is default behavior collecting resources from the current subscription, and including cost data. For examples on how to run the script for different scopes please see 1-Collect Examples.

.\Get-AzureServices.ps1 -includeCost $true

If using an Azure Migrate export: Run Get-RessourcesFromAM.ps1 against an Azure Migrate Assessment.xlsx file to convert the VM & Disk SKUs into the same output as Get-AzureServices.ps1 For example:

.\Get-RessourcesFromAM.ps1 -filePath "C:\path\to\Assessment.xlsx" -outputFile "C:\path\to\summary.json"

The script will generate a resources.json and a summary.json file in the same directory. The resources.json file contains the full inventory of resources and their properties, while the summary.json file contains a summary of the resources collected.

This script will check the availability of the services in the target region based on the inventory collected in the previous step.

Navigate to the 2-AvailabilityCheck folder and run Get-AvailabilityInformation.ps1. It will generate an Availability_Mapping.json Run the following script:

.\Get-AvailabilityInformation.ps1 

Check the availability of the resources in scope for a specific region. This will generate a file named Availability_Mapping_<Region>.json in the same directory. Run the following script:

.\Get-Region.ps1 -Region <Target-region>

Note that this functionality is not yet complete and is a work in progress. For more alternatives on how to run the script please see 2-AvailabilityCheck Examples

The Azure public pricing API is used, meaning that, prices are not customer-specific, but are only used to calculate the relative cost difference between regions for each meter ID.

Navigate to the 3-CostInformation folder and run the script using the Perform-RegionComparison.ps1 script to do cost comparison with target Region(s).

$regions = @("Target-region")

.\Perform-RegionComparison.ps1 -regions $regions -outputFormat json -resourceFile ..\1-Collect\resources.json 

This will generate region_comparison_prices.json file

Please see 3-CostInformation for more details.

This script generates formatted Excel (.xlsx) reports based on the output from the previous check script.

Navigate to the 7-Report folder and run the Get-Report.ps1, also specify the path to the availability information and the cost comparision path.

.\Get-Report.ps1 -availabilityInfoPath ..\2-AvailabilityCheck\Availability_Mapping_<Target-region>.json -costComparisonPath ..\3-CostInformation\region_comparison_prices.json

The script generates an .xlsx file in the 7-report folder, named Availability_Report_CURRENTTIMESTAMP.

Open the generated Excel file. The reports provide detailed information for each service. These reports help you analyze service availability and cost differences across different regions.

Please see 7-Report for more details.