As a consultant, I have access to a number of my clients’ Windows Azure Subscriptions. When you have many subscriptions to sort through, it is not very helpful if they have subscription names like Subscription-1 or Free Trial – especially when you have multiple of them by these names!

But fear not, you are not stuck with the name. You can change it to something more useful.

BACKGROUND:  How does a “subscription” fit into Windows Azure? When you log into Windows Azure, you log into an “account” where an account is tied to some login credential. Once logged in, that account can see zero, one, or more subscriptions. A subscription can have cloud resources allocated against it, such as virtual machines and web sites and databases. In the simplest case (e.g., not under an enterprise agreement), the subscription is also the unit of billing, typically tied to a credit card and possibly attached to an MSDN account or free trial.

How to Change the Name of Your Windows Azure Subscription

1. Navigate to https://manage.windowsazure.com and sign in.
2. Once signed in, in the top-right corner, click on your account name, and then “View my bill” from the drop-down menu:
   
3. This will take you to https://account.windowsazure.com/Subscriptions – and of course you could have navigated here directly, but I wanted to start from the more familiar portal experience.
   
4. In this example, the subscription we will rename is currently called “Free Trial” – click on that to bring up the details page specific to that subscription.
   
5. Scroll down the page a bit until you see “Edit subscription details” along the right-hand side:
   
6. Click on “Edit subscription details” to pop up a page that will allow you to change the subscription name or its service administrator:
   
7. Change the name to something more descriptive. Here I change my to “DevPartners Production” which indicates this subscription holds assets for DevPartners (which is my company), and these are Production assets (not Dev, Test, UAT, Play, Disposable, Demo, etc.). Some companies might prefer separate accounts for indvidual applications or teams.
   
8. Click the check mark, and you’ll see that your Windows Azure Subscription is now helpfully named:
   

It only takes seconds to make this change, but think of all the mistakes and misunderstanding it could help prevent.

[This is part of a series of posts on #StupidAzureTricks, explained here.]