FinOps hubs Open, extensible, and scalable cost governance for the enterprise.

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FinOps hubs are a reliable, trustworthy platform for cost analytics, insights, and optimization – virtual command centers for leaders throughout the organization to report on, monitor, and optimize cost based on their organizational needs. FinOps hubs focus on 3 core design principles:

  • Be the standard
    Strive to be the principal embodiment of the FinOps Framework.
  • Built for scale
    Designed to support the largest accounts and organizations.
  • Open and extensible
    Embrace the ecosystem and prioritize enabling the platform.

We are very early in our journey. Today, FinOps hubs extend Cost Management by exporting cost details to a consolidated storage account and addressing a few of the inherent limitations that make exports more difficult to use. In their most basic form, FinOps hubs enable more Power BI reporting options. On the more advanced end, FinOps hubs are a foundation for you to build your own cost management and optimization solution.

💵 Estimated cost: $25/mo per $1M in cost being monitored

Estimated cost includes $5 for Azure storage and data processing plus up to $20 per user for Power BI licenses. Exact cost will vary based on discounts, data size per $1M (~20GB of data), and Power BI license requirements. Pipelines will run once a day per export, plus one additional monthly run per export. Pipeline run time depends on data size. For details, refer to the FinOps hub cost estimate in the Azure Pricing Calculator or monitor hub cost using the Data ingestion report.

FinOps hubs requires an Enterprise Agreement (EA), Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA), or Microsoft Partner Agreement (MPA) account (including Cloud Solution Provider subscriptions). If you have a Microsoft Online Services Agreement (MOSA, aka PAYG) or a Microsoft internal subscription, you will need to use FinOps hubs 0.1.1. Please note Power BI reports have not been tested extensively with MOSA and MS Internal subscriptions. Speak to a Microsoft representative or file a billing support request to ask about migrating your subscription to Microsoft Customer Agreement.


🙋‍♀️ Why FinOps hubs?

Many organizations that use Microsoft Cost Management eventually hit a wall where they need some capability that isn’t natively available. When they do, their only options are to leverage one of the many third party tools or build something from scratch. While the cost management tooling ecosystem is rich and vast with many great options, they may be overkill or perhaps they don’t solve specific needs. In these cases, organizations export cost data and build a custom solution. But this comes with many challenges, as these organizations are not generally staffed with the data engineers needed to design, build, and maintain a scalable data platform. FinOps hubs seeks to provide that foundation to streamline efforts in getting up and running with your own homegrown cost management solution.

FinOps hubs will streamline implementing the FinOps Framework, are being designed to scale to meet the largest enterprise needs, and will be open and extensible to support building custom solutions without the hassle of building the backend data store. FinOps hubs are designed for and by the community. Please join the discussion and let us know what you’d like to see next or learn how to contribute and be a part of the team.

Join the conversation Learn how to contribute


🌟 Benefits

  • Clean up duplicated data in daily Cost Management exports (and save money on storage).
  • Convert exported data to parquet for faster data access.
  • Connect Power BI to subscriptions, resource groups, and other scopes.
  • Connect Power BI to Azure Government and Azure China.
  • Connect Power BI to Microsoft Online Services Agreement (MOSA) subscriptions1.
  • Report on multiple subscriptions, resource groups, or billing accounts.
  • Streamlined deployment and management with PowerShell.
  • Full alignment with the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS).
  • Coming soon: Ingest data from subscriptions in multiple tenants into a single storage account2.
  • Coming soon: Ingest data into Azure Data Explorer.

1) MOSA (or PAYG) subscriptions are only supported in FinOps hubs 0.1.x. FinOps hubs 0.2 requires FOCUS cost data from Cost Management exports, which are not supported for MOSA subscriptions. Please contact support about transitioning to a Microsoft Customer Agreement account.

2) EA billing scopes can be exported to any tenant today. Simply sign in to that tenant with an account that has access to the billing scope and target storage account to configure exports. Non-billing scopes (subscriptions, management groups, and resource groups) and all MCA scopes are only supported in the tenant they exist in today but will be supported via a “remote hubs” feature in a future FinOps hubs release.


📦 What’s included

The FinOps hub template includes the following resources:

  • Storage account (Data Lake Storage Gen2) to hold all cost data.
  • Data Factory instance to manage data ingestion and cleanup.
  • Key Vault to store the Data Factory system managed identity credentials.

Once deployed, you can report on the data in Power BI or by connecting to the storage account directly.

Screenshot of the cost summary report Screenshot of the services cost report Screenshot of the commitment discounts coverage report

Browse reports See the template


📚 Explore the FinOps reports

Each report in the FinOps toolkit is available as a PBIX or PBIT file. The PBIX file contains sample data that can be viewed in Power BI desktop without connecting to your account.

To visualize the reports available, simply download the PBIX Power BI report file from the desired release and open the report in Power BI Desktop. From there, you can navigate through the different pages of the report, which have been pre-filled with test data.

Screenshot of the Rate optimization report with test data


➕ Create a new hub

  1. Deploy your FinOps hub.

    Learn more

  2. Configure scopes to monitor.

    FinOps hubs use Cost Management exports to load the data you want to monitor. You can configure exports manually or grant access to your hub to manage exports for you.

    Learn more

  3. Connect to your data.

    You can connect to your data from any system that supports Azure storage. For ideas, see get started with hubs below. We recommend using pre-built Power BI starter templates to get started quickly.

    Learn more

If you run into any issues, see Troubleshooting Power BI reports.

If you need to deploy to Azure Gov or Azure China, please use FinOps hubs 0.1.1. Instructions are the same except you will create an amortized cost export instead of a FOCUS export.

 

If you run into any issues, refer to the Troubleshooting guide.

1) A “scope” is an Azure construct that contains resources or enables purchasing services, like a resource group, subscription, management group, or billing account. The resource ID for a scope will be the Azure Resource Manager URI that identifies the scope (e.g., “/subscriptions/###” for a subscription or “/providers/Microsoft.Billing/billingAccounts/###” for a billing account). To learn more, see Understand and work with scopes.


🛫 Get started with hubs

After deploying a hub instance, there are several ways for you to get started:

  1. Customize the pre-built Power BI reports.

    Our Power BI reports are starter templates and intended to be customized. We encourage you to customize as needed. Learn more.

  2. Create your own Power BI reports.

    If you’d like to create your own reports or add cost data to an existing report, you can either copy queries from a pre-built report or connect manually using the Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 connector.

  3. Connect to Microsoft Fabric for advanced queries.

    If you use OneLake in Microsoft Fabric, you can create a shortcut to the ingestion container in your hubs storage account to run SQL or KQL queries directly against the data in hubs. Learn more.

  4. Access the cost data from custom tools.

    Cost data is stored in an Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 account. You can use any tool that supports Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 to access the data. Refer to the data dictionary for details about available columns.

  5. Apply cost allocation logic, augment, or manipulate your cost data using Data Factory.

    Data Factory is used to ingest and transform data. We recommend using Data Factory as a cost-efficient solution to apply custom logic to your cost data. Do not modify built-in pipelines or data in the msexports container. If you create custom pipelines, monitor new data in the ingestion container and use a consistent prefix to ensure they don’t overlap with new pipelines. Refer to data processing for details about how data is processed.

    Keep in mind this is the primary area we are planning to evolve in upcoming FinOps toolkit releases. Please familiarize yourself with our roadmap to avoid conflicts with future updates. Consider contributing to the project to add support for new scenarios to avoid conflicts.

  6. Generate custom alerts using Power Automate.

    You have many options for generating custom alerts. Power Automate is a great option for people who are new to automation but you can also use Data Factory, Functions, or any other service that supports custom code or direct access to data in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2.

No matter what you choose to do, we recommend creating a new Bicep module to support updating your solution. You can reference finops-hub/main.bicep or hub.bicep directly to ensure you can apply new updates as they’re released.

If you need to change hub.bicep, be sure to track those changes and re-apply them when upgrading to the latest release. We generally don’t recommend modifying the template or modules directly to avoid conflicts with future updates. Instead, consider contributing those changes back to the open source project. Learn more.

If you access data in storage or are creating or customizing Power BI reports, please refer to the data dictionary for details about the available columns.


🔐 Required permissions

Required permissions for deploying or updating hub instances are covered in the template details.

You will need one or more of the following to export your cost data:

Scope Permission
Subscriptions and resource groups (all account types) Cost Management Contributor.
EA billing scopes Enterprise Reader, Department Reader, or Account Owner (aka enrollment account).
MCA billing scopes Contributor on the billing account, billing profile, or invoice section.
MPA billing scopes Contributor on the billing account, billing profile, or customer.

Note that CSP customers will need to configure exports for each subscription in order to ingest their total cost into FinOps hubs. Cost Management does not support management group exports for MCA or CSP subscriptions (as of May 2024).

For additional details, refer to Cost Management documentation.


🧰 Related tools


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