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Now that you have an Azure subscription with Azure Automation enabled, the first item of business is creating an Azure Automation account. An Azure Automation account is different from your Microsoft account or Azure subscription. Your Azure subscription contains all your Azure resources, such as Cloud Services, Service Bus, HDInsight, Mobile Services, and so on. An Azure Automation account holds all Azure Automation resources for that account. An Azure Automation resource (such as a runbook or assets) within one account cannot be implicitly shared across other Azure Automation accounts. However, you can view one or more Azure Automation accounts as a logical unit of isolation within an Azure subscription.

You can use an Automation account to organize the automation runbooks specific to a person or a group. Think of an Automation account as a top-level file folder in which you store your runbooks in specific regions. You can have multiple automation accounts per subscription with a maximum of 30 Azure Automation accounts per subscription in different regions, if needed.

For example, an IT operations person might create an Azure Automation account for different groups, such as Marketing, Finance, HR, Development/Test, and Research. These five individual accounts can then hold automation runbooks that are specific to each group’s provisioning and lifetime management of resources. Programmatically, the resources in one Azure Automation account don’t have scope in another Azure Automation account.

To create an Azure Automation account, do the following:
1. Sign in to the Azure Management Portal at manage.windowsazure.com.

2. Click Automation in the left pane to go to the Automation page, and then click Create An Automation Account. The Add A New Automation Account dialog box appears.

3. In the Account Name text box, enter the name you want to use for the account. In the Region drop-down list box, select the region you want to use for the account. Choose the Azure Subscription that you want the Automation account to apply to, and then click the check mark.

4. The Azure Automation account is displayed on the Automation page

The Azure Automation Account page provides you with the following information:
- Dashboard tab Shows diagnostic, job, and usage information for the Automation jobs that have run. It indicates the different status of the jobs (queued, failed, stopped, suspended, completed, and running) with a granularity of one hour to 30 days. You can see the number of runbooks you have, assets (variables, connections, credentials, schedules), and more summary information.

- Runbooks tab Provides a list of runbooks and their current view. You can filter the job status by specific dates and times. Other runbooks can be imported here, or you can export one of the runbooks from this Azure Automation account to be used in another account.

- Assets tab Allows management of assets global to the mynewautomationacccount runbook. You can modify and create variables, connections, credentials, and schedules. You can also import additional modules that contain Windows PowerShell workflows to use in your runbooks.

- Scale tab Allows you to choose the Free or Standard Automation plan. The plan you choose applies to all Automation accounts in the subscription. The Free plan allows 500 minutes of job runtime per month and is not billed. If you need unlimited minutes of job use, choose the billed Standard plan.

Source of Information : Azure Automation