Doubling Down on the Importance of Clean FinOps Data

Key Insight

Microsoft is expanding the cost and usage data available in the portal so that FinOps practitioners can gain insights that improve their practice.

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Summary

Education: Microsoft wants to help organizations learn how to adopt FinOps. While tools help with implementing FinOps, the cultural shift can be more difficult, so Microsoft is focusing on teaching people about the collaboration that is required to be successful with FinOps.

Data: Having the right data is critical, so Microsoft wants to deliver more insights to the practitioner, with less effort required. Recent improvements include:

• Expanding available cost and usage data with actual and amortized cost
• Making it easier to drill down to the root cause of a change in cost
• Added exports compliant with the FinOps Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) format
• Export price sheets including those specific to your contract
• Export reservation details such as transactions and recommendations
• Performance and scalability improvements that make the experience better

Combining the data that Microsoft has and merging it with your own usage data unlocks fundamental FinOps use-cases like cost allocation and unit cost economics.

FOCUS: Microsoft has a few different types of customer accounts (MCA, EA, Pay-as-you-Go), and FOCUS normalizes the billing export across these account types. FOCUS also combines actual and amortized costs into one dataset, drastically reducing the cost of compute and storage needed to process this data.

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