Whether you consider yourself a FinOps practitioner, someone who’s enthusiastic about driving cloud efficiency and maximizing the value you get from the cloud or were just asked to look at ways to reduce cost, the FinOps toolkit has something for you. This month, you’ll find support for AI agents like GitHub Copilot, Power BI updates for invoicing, commitment discounts, and usage analysis, documentation updates from the top feature asks, and more! Read on for details.

New to the FinOps toolkit?

In case you haven’t heard, the FinOps toolkit is an open-source collection of tools and resources that help you learn, adopt, and implement FinOps in the Microsoft Cloud. The foundation of the toolkit is the Implementing FinOps guide that helps you get started with FinOps whether you’re using native tools in the Azure portal, looking for ways to automate and extend those tools, or if you’re looking to build your own FinOps tools and reports. To learn more about the toolkit, how to provide feedback, or how to contribute, see FinOps toolkit documentation.

Introducing agentic AI for FinOps hubs

Not long ago, AI was a niche tool reserved for specialized tasks. Something tinkerers and researchers played with in controlled environments. Now, it’s everywhere—answering questions, summarizing content, and even helping generate new content. But the real game-changer is moving beyond the simple question-response loop and leveraging AI for complex workflows where you tie specialized agents together to not only summarize and generate content but take action and perform tasks on your behalf. A true assistant. And with the new FinOps hubs copilot instructions, you can connect AI agents to your organizational data and orchestrate FinOps scenarios.

With the latest update to the FinOps hubs, AI agents—including GitHub Copilot—can now seamlessly connect to FinOps hubs, leveraging predefined AI instructions and the Azure MCP server to unlock FinOps insights in real time. This means any AI-powered assistant can query and interpret FinOps data, providing developers, finance teams, and operations specialists with instant visibility into cloud costs, efficiency metrics, and optimization recommendations—without needing manual intervention or deep KQL expertise. By integrating AI-driven decision-making into FinOps workflows, this feature redefines what’s possible when intelligent automation meets financial operations at scale.

The easiest way to get started is with GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code. You don’t need to be a developer or know how to write code. You can download and extract the FinOps hubs copilot instructions and connect to your hub instance in minutes. To learn more, see Configure and use AI agents.

Power BI updates for invoicing, commitment discounts, and usage analysis

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve the built-in reports to support your needs. In the May release, you’ll find a new report for Invoicing and chargeback and new pages within the Rate optimization and Cost summary reports.

The Invoicing and chargeback report helps you implement the Invoicing and chargeback capability. The report includes a few breakdowns of your billed cost, invoice recon pages for both Enterprise Agreement (EA) and Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA), chargeback pages, and more!

In the Rate optimization report you’ll find two new pages for commitment discounts. First up is the Commitment discount utilization page, which shows your aggregate utilization percentage across all commitment discounts going back as far as you’ve exported your data. This was created after a request for historical data beyond the past few months you can see in the portal. You can also customize the report to show a specific utilization target and don’t forget to configure alerts when you publish the report to your Power BI workspace!

You’ll also find a new Commitment discount resources page which shows the resources that consumed a specific commitment discount. This is fairly straightforward, but answers a common question we hear during exploration. And one great thing about both of these pages is that you can right-click any commitment discount throughout the Rate optimization report to drill through to these pages for a specific commitment discount. This can be very helpful when investigating data in a more seamless way.

And lastly, the Cost summary report includes a new Usage analysis page that shows usage over time compared to cost for a specific unit. You’ll find a breakdown of cost over time by meter category with an overlaid total cost in the chart, plus a table of each charge with its consumed quantity, block size, price, and total cost. I shared this in a recent Learning FOCUS blog post, so it’s great to see this now available for you leverage and let us know how we can improve.

To learn more about all reports, see FinOps toolkit Power BI reports. We hope you’ll find these Power BI updates helpful and encourage you to share your feedback about what you’d like to see in future updates. We’re always looking for ways to improve your experience and welcome any new ideas or even pull requests! (I just saw a new pull request from a customer today!)

Listening to the community: FinOps hubs documentation updates

Every month we try to implement one of the top feature requests submitted and voted on by the community. This month, we picked up two changes related to FinOps hubs documentation. The first is one about publishing an architecture diagram to help organizations understand what’s included in the template and how the system works at a high level.

If you’re new, FinOps hubs is a data pipeline solution that takes Cost Management exports and uses Azure Data Factory to ingest data into Azure Data Explorer or Microsoft Fabric. Power BI reports and Data Explorer dashboards are available to help visualize and explore costs in detail. And, new this month, AI agents like GitHub Copilot can access the data in Data Explorer using the Azure MCP server. To learn more, see the FinOps hubs overview.

With the expansive growth of FinOps hubs, we’ve also started to get deeper questions around the upgrade process and frequency. With FinOps toolkit updates released monthly, some organizations are curious how often they should plan to update. And as usual, the answer is, “it depends”. When you update ultimately depends on the features you need. If there’s an important feature that you need now, then upgrade to the latest version when it gets released. If you don’t need any of the updates, then skip that release. In general, there isn’t a penalty or risk skipping one or more releases. While we hope you’ll find valuable new and updated features in each release, we also want to minimize the operational management effort. And with that, we’ve refactored the FinOps hub upgrade guide to make it easier and clearer to understand what steps are required to upgrade from one version to another, even if you’re skipping one or more releases.

The new upgrade guide organizes all steps into a simple, clear tutorial that helps you upgrade to the latest version from any previous release. Each step clearly calls out when it’s required or if it can be skipped for specific releases. If you’ve ever had a question about the exact steps to update from an older version, we hope this will help you get there!

Every month we try to implement one of the top feature requests. This month, we picked up two changes related to FinOps hubs documentation. The first is one about sharing a FinOps hubs architecture diagram. Fairly straightforward.

Other new and noteworthy updates

Many small improvements and bug fixes go into each release, so covering everything in detail can be a lot to take in. But I do want to call out a few other small things that you may be interested in.

In the Implementing FinOps guide:

• Documented a new FOCUS 1.0 conformance gap where ServiceName may be empty for some purchases and adjustments.

In FinOps hubs:

• Fix BillingPeriodStart and BillingPeriodEnd to always be at the start of the month.


• Added support for backporting FOCUS 1.2 into the existing FOCUS 1.0 schema (when released later this month).
  
  
  
  • This is a short-term solution to avoid errors if FOCUS 1.2 exports are created.
  
  
  • Full FOCUS 1.2 support will come in a future release.
  
  
  
  


• Refactored internal code to align with our vision for the FinOps hubs extensibility model.

In Power BI reports:

• Fixed inconsistent numbers in the running total chart caused by date handling issues

In FinOps alerts:

• Added telemetry to the FinOps alerts template to track usage and bugs.

In Azure optimization engine:

• Upgraded Azure Resource Manager SQL Server name availability API version, used by the engine deployment script, due to upcoming deprecation of 2014-04-01 version.

In PowerShell commands:

• Fixed a date handling error in the Start-FinOpsCostExport command.


• Fixed upcoming breaking changes warning in Get-AzAccessToken cmdlet by adding temporary warning suppression.

In open data:

• Added the “10 Seconds” unit of measure.


• Added 24 new and 19 existing resource types.


• Added 24 new service mappings.

What’s next

I’m excited about what’s coming over the next few months. Here are a few of the things we’re looking at:

• FinOps hubs will add recommendations, similar to what you see in Azure Optimization Engine and FinOps workbooks, a new extensibility model to support customizations at scale, and continued data quality improvements on top of what Cost Management provides.


• FinOps hubs and Power BI will both get updated to support FOCUS 1.2.


• Power BI will continue to get recurring updates and expand to more FinOps capabilities.


• FinOps workbooks will continue to get recurring updates, expand to more FinOps capabilities, and add cost from FinOps hubs.


• Azure Optimization Engine will continue to receive small updates as we move its capabilities into FinOps hubs in upcoming releases.


• Each release, we’ll try to pick at least one of the highest voted issues (based on 👍 votes) to continue to evolve based on your feedback, so keep the feedback coming!

To learn more, check out the FinOps toolkit roadmap, and please let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see in a future release. Whether you’re using native products, automating and extending those products, or using custom solutions, we’re here to help make FinOps easier to adopt and implement.