As organizations expand and scale their cloud operations, they often face increasingly complex challenges in tracking, managing, and optimizing costs effectively. Luckily, Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) was designed to simplify some of these challenges and provide organizations with a billing platform designed to grow and scale with them.

Compared to Enterprise Agreement (EA) accounts, MCA introduces a streamlined, fully digital purchase process that is both shorter and easier to navigate. It offers enhanced billing management, including the ability to handle multiple invoices and payment methods for improved cost allocation and chargeback without complex internal rebilling. With pay-as-you-go billing and dynamic updates to agreement terms, MCA ensures organizations have the flexibility to adapt to their changing needs and remain aligned with the latest offerings. And this is just a few of the benefits you’ll find when transitioning from EA to MCA.

But change can be scary. There are new billing constructs with new APIs and experiences that emit new data formats. This can feel overwhelming, but the FinOps toolkit is here to help by extending Cost Management capabilities to offer a consistent experience across multiple EA and MCA accounts while also delivering new, much needed capabilities to support FinOps initiatives across teams and organizations of any size. With tools to support reporting in and outside of Power BI, you can consolidate your costs across accounts, quantify savings, and gain actionable insights to optimize your cloud investments.

Bridge the gap between EA and MCA data

One of the first questions organizations have when they move from EA to MCA is, how can they view their historical costs in a single place? The truth is, this is the same challenge EA admins have when they renew their EA enrollment – they get a new account, which doesn’t show the historical data in Cost Management. And with a new data format that includes new concepts and terms, even viewing costs together outside the portal can be a challenge. This is where the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) comes in.

FOCUS is an open specification for billing data that standardizes data across accounts and even providers. The FinOps toolkit leverages FOCUS to provide consistent experiences across EA and MCA accounts. Some customers are even extending these solutions to bring in non-Azure data from AWS, GCP, and more!

I won’t go into the specifics about how FOCUS is the best version of our cost data but check out What is FOCUS to learn more about FOCUS and its benefits. I also have a blog series for those interested in using FOCUS to answer common FinOps questions.

Report on EA and MCA costs in Power BI

If you use the Cost Management app for Power BI, you may be familiar with some of the limitations, like incomplete details around savings plan usage or that it only supports one account. You also can’t customize the app to meet your needs or leverage it when you do transition to MCA. In fact, the Cost Management app for Power BI and the underlying connector, which does support MCA, are no longer being maintained. The recommendation from the Cost Management team is to export cost details to a storage account and report on that in Power BI using the Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) connector. This is exactly what the FinOps toolkit does for you, with the added benefit of leveraging Cost Management FOCUS exports to give you that consistent experience across EA and MCA, despite the underlying changes to the data.

I’ll explain this in more detail in a separate blog post, but this is as simple as exporting FOCUS costs to an ADLS storage account and then downloading and connecting the FinOps toolkit Power BI reports to your storage account. Once you’ve exported data from each account into the same storage account, you’ll be able to view all costs together in a single pane of glass.

Scale analytics and insights with FinOps hubs

While standing up Power BI reports on top of exported cost data is quick and easy, it does come with its limitations, primarily around performance for organizations with a lot of spend or interested in reporting on historical data for year-over-year analyses and long-term projections. This is where FinOps hubs come in.

FinOps hubs are an open, extensible platform and data pipeline solution that ingests and normalizes data using Azure Data Explorer for high-performance, big data analytics at scale. Instead of waiting hours for Power BI to ingest data from storage and configuring incremental refresh to work around refresh challenges, Power BI pulls the latest data when you load the page. No refresh needed! Every visit gets the latest data in seconds! We generally recommend organizations consider FinOps hubs when they want to track over $100K in spend. The cost of the infrastructure is less than 0.02% of your spend and everyone we’ve talked to says the time savings alone from not struggling with data refreshes is worth it.

Another major benefit of FinOps hubs is the data quality improvements. As part of data ingestion, FinOps hubs clean up some of the gaps in the cost data, like populating missing prices and costs. This means that, by exporting costs and prices, FinOps hubs can provide more accurate savings calculations across both EA and MCA accounts. This includes a breakdown of savings for negotiated and commitment discounts.

FinOps hubs with Data Explorer comes with the same, great Power BI reports available for those using storage, just optimized for vastly improved performance and scalability. If you don’t use Power BI, there’s also a Data Explorer dashboard available that covers the same data with new visuals and improved reporting in a few areas, like around data ingestion monitoring. And since Data Explorer has a rich set of integrations, you can query data directly from Data Explorer to join it with other datasets, like Log analytics or App Insights, or even directly from other reporting and visualization tools.

Again, I’ll explain this in more detail in a future blog post, but the process here adds an extra step. Instead of creating a storage account, you’ll deploy the FinOps hub template, then configure exports in Cost Management, and setup reports in Power BI, Data Explorer, or your tool of choice.

FinOps hubs come with a few additional options, like enabling private networking, ingesting data across tenants, and managing exports for you, but each of these are optional features you can choose to enable when needed. And there’s a lot more coming in this area, like direct integration into Microsoft Fabric and an extensibility model to facilitate our vision of covering all capabilities in the FinOps Framework.

Summary and next steps

Transitioning to Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) opens doors to a more streamlined and powerful approach to account and cost management, and the FinOps toolkit is here to help you smoothly transition without losing visibility into your historical cost trends. In fact, you even get new capabilities with the powerful analytics engine that comes in FinOps hubs with Data Explorer. And since everything leverages the FOCUS open-source specification, you’re getting set up for a more efficient and effective FinOps practice that aligns with proven practices from an industry-wide FinOps community!

Stay tuned for more details about each of these options. Or get started today and check out FinOps hubs and the FinOps toolkit Power BI reports. And while you’re there, take a peek at some of the other tools and resources available to help you amplify your FinOps efforts. If you’re new to FOCUS and want to know how to map columns from the actual and amortized cost data, check out the FOCUS column mapping.