Azure FinOps Essentials

Hi there, and welcome to this week’s edition of Azure FinOps Essentials! 🎉

In this edition, I’m taking a closer look at FOCUS, the open cost and usage specification that aims to simplify and standardize cloud billing data across vendors. If you’ve ever dealt with inconsistent billing formats, confusing terminology, or multi-cloud reporting challenges—this one’s for you.

I’ll cover what FOCUS is, why it matters, and how Microsoft is embracing the standard by integrating FOCUS support directly into Azure Cost Management. Plus, I’ll walk through how you can start exporting Azure cost data in FOCUS format today.

Let’s explore how standardization is reshaping FinOps—and what that means for your Azure cost strategy.

Cheers, Michiel

Why Billing Data Needs a Common Language

One of the biggest challenges in FinOps isn’t just understanding costs—it’s making sense of the data that describes them. Every cloud provider, SaaS vendor, and platform service delivers billing data in their own format. Different column names, different definitions, and different structures. Even simple concepts like “billed cost” or “resource name” vary wildly between vendors.

That complexity turns cost analysis into a data engineering problem. Teams spend a huge amount of time building and maintaining ETL pipelines to normalize billing files before they can even begin actual analysis. Add a new vendor, and you need to build a whole new schema.

FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) aims to fix this.

It’s an open-source, vendor-neutral specification designed to define a common schema for cost and usage data—regardless of where it comes from. With FOCUS, all vendors speak the same billing language. That makes billing data easier to ingest, easier to compare, and far quicker to analyze.

Instead of creating custom logic to interpret each new invoice format, FinOps practitioners can rely on a consistent structure with shared definitions. That means less time wrangling data and more time delivering insights that drive value.

By adopting FOCUS, organizations aren’t just simplifying technical pipelines—they’re enabling cross-cloud financial visibility, better reporting, and faster decision-making.

What Microsoft Brings to FOCUS

While FOCUS is built to benefit every cloud practitioner—regardless of vendor—its impact is highly relevant for anyone working in Azure. Microsoft is not just a supporter of the specification; it’s a founding member of the FOCUS initiative and actively contributes to shaping the future of the format.

That’s no surprise. Azure users know how flexible and broad the platform is—offering everything from IaaS and PaaS to SaaS. But with that flexibility comes complexity. Services are billed in different ways. Terms differ depending on whether you’re in EA or MCA. Even within Microsoft’s own ecosystem, it’s easy to end up stitching together multiple datasets just to understand your monthly spend.

Microsoft sees this and wants to reduce that friction. By adopting FOCUS, Azure aligns its billing exports with a standardized schema, designed from the ground up for FinOps use cases like allocation, cost analysis, budgeting, and forecasting. It’s a step toward clarity over complexity.

With native support for FOCUS now rolling out across Cost Management exports and APIs, this means Azure customers can:

• Work with a billing dataset built for analysis, not just accounting.

• Spend less time transforming data and more time acting on it.

• Use standardized fields like BilledCost, AmortizedCost, ResourceId, ServiceCategory, and ChargeType—consistent across all supported vendors.

• Take advantage of prebuilt Power BI dashboards and tooling within the FinOps Toolkit.

And because Microsoft helps steer the specification, you can expect a deep alignment between FinOps best practices and what Azure exposes in its billing data moving forward.

This isn’t just another export format. It’s a shared language—one that makes billing data more transparent, portable, and usable across organizations and clouds. For Azure users, it’s a major improvement in how cloud costs can be analyzed and communicated.

How to Export Azure Billing Data in FOCUS Format

If you want to start working with your Azure billing data in the FOCUS format, Azure makes this possible through Cost Management Exports. These exports can be configured directly from the Azure Portal and allow you to automate daily or monthly exports of your cost and usage data into a storage account.

To get started:

• Go to Cost Management > Exports in the Azure portal.

• Choose the appropriate scope (subscription, billing profile, resource group, etc.).

• Select + Create, and from the list of export types, choose Cost and usage details (FOCUS).

• Define the export frequency (daily or monthly) and choose your output format (CSV or Parquet).

• Provide a destination storage account and directory.

• Azure will handle partitioning large files automatically and provide a manifest file to help you ingest them reliably.

The FOCUS export combines actual and amortized cost data into a single, clean format—ideal for analysis or integration with FinOps tooling. It supports most account types (EA, MCA, MPA) and provides backward-compatible schema versions so existing pipelines remain functional.

Once configured, your export will run on schedule and generate files that match the FOCUS specification, ready to use for dashboards, Power BI reports, or further processing in tools like Microsoft Fabric or your FinOps platform.

This automation eliminates manual downloads and transforms Azure billing into something predictable, repeatable, and aligned with the broader FinOps ecosystem.

Wrapping Up: Why FOCUS Matters—And Microsoft’s Role

FOCUS is more than just another data format—it’s a major step forward for FinOps maturity. By aligning billing data across vendors, it brings consistency, clarity, and structure to a part of cloud management that has long been messy and fragmented.

Instead of reverse-engineering what “Billed Cost” means across multiple clouds, FinOps practitioners can now speak a common language and use standardized datasets to allocate, analyze, and optimize with confidence.

Microsoft’s early and ongoing involvement in the FOCUS initiative demonstrates a strong commitment to this open approach. Azure Cost Management already supports exporting data in FOCUS format, and that’s just the start. With native integration into tools like Power BI and Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft is helping make cost data easier to work with—at scale and in real time.

For FinOps teams working in or around the Azure ecosystem, adopting FOCUS can cut down on operational overhead, boost reporting accuracy, and simplify onboarding across teams, tools, and vendors.

Standardized cost data means more time delivering value—and less time wrestling with spreadsheets.

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