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 release focuses on stability and usability improvements across FinOps hubs, Power BI reports, and Azure Optimization Engine with a few key additions, like configuring Key Vault purge protection when deploying FinOps hubs and support for format and compression when creating Cost Management exports via PowerShell. 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.
Faster troubleshooting with expanded documentation
When something goes wrong, the fastest path to resolution is clear, comprehensive documentation. But finding the right guidance hasn't always been straightforward.
This release addresses that gap across several fronts. The new Data Lake Storage connectivity guide walks through connecting to FinOps hubs data from tools and services beyond Power BI. Updated Configure scopes documentation clarifies support for multiple Azure scopes and cross-cloud data ingestion. New guidance explains how to remove private networking to reduce costs when it's no longer needed.
On the troubleshooting front, expanded guidance covers common Data Explorer ingestion errors, including SEM0080, ErrorCodeNotString, and ingestion drop failures. Power BI report documentation now includes export requirements that clarify which Cost Management exports each report needs. Updated FOCUS converter documentation covers the newly added 1.2-preview fields: ServiceSubcategory, InvoiceId, PricingCurrency, and SkuMeter.
Have a tip that helped you get unblocked? Share it with the community to help others facing the same challenge and let us know if there’s anything we can do to help!
Join us for FinOps toolkit office hours
Community engagement has always been at the heart of the FinOps toolkit. Over the years, some of the best features and fixes have come directly from practitioners sharing what's working, what's not, and what they need next. That feedback loop is invaluable, and the community has been asking for a more direct way to connect with the team.
FinOps toolkit office hours make that possible. Join us every other Wednesday, from 8:30 to 9:00 AM Pacific (4:30 to 5:00 PM UTC), drop in to get help with deployment issues, discuss feature requests, share feedback, or connect with others on the same journey. No agenda, no preparation required. All experience levels welcome.
Join the next session or add it to your calendar.
Scaling FinOps hubs to meet enterprise demands
As FinOps hubs adoption grows, so do the demands placed on it. Organizations need deployments that satisfy compliance policies, recover gracefully from failures, and adapt to evolving requirements. This month, you’ll find improvements touching all three.
Compliance requirements vary widely across organizations. Some Azure Landing Zone policies require Key Vault purge protection but enabling it by default creates friction during development and testing when frequent redeployments are the norm. A new optional enablePurgeProtection parameter lets you enable purge protection when policies require it while keeping it off by default for flexibility elsewhere. This release also tightens the default security posture by replacing the User Access Administrator role with the more restrictive RBAC Administrator role, now scoped specifically to the Managed Exports app. (I’ll touch on apps in a second…)
Reliability was a big focus in this release. You’ll see improvements that address pipeline issues that could cause deployment failures or data inconsistencies, including ADF triggers not starting after deployment, InitializeHub pipeline failures, and duplicate records in certain scenarios. We’re always looking out for reliability and data quality issues, so please let us know if you run into any problems.
Extensibility has always been at the heart of FinOps hubs – it’s one of our defining design principles. But there’s a lot to extensibility and the underlying architecture needed to catch up. This release reorganizes the Bicep templates into separate application modules, laying the groundwork for more flexible deployment options in future releases. The vision: deploy only the components you need, extend with your own, and integrate more seamlessly with existing infrastructure. You’ll hear more as we evolve this extensibility model. I’m incredibly excited about the potential here.
Have an extension you’d like to see? Start a discussion and explore it with the community. We’d love to hear from you!
Streamline export automation with Parquet
Cost Management exports can grow large, especially for organizations with complex environments or long retention periods. CSV files get the job done, but they are verbose and slow to query at scale. We always recommend using parquet exports with snappy compression for the fastest downloads and ingestion times. Now you can use PowerShell to export your data using parquet.
For those who aren’t aware, the FinOps toolkit includes a PowerShell module with several useful commands, like creating and executing Cost Management exports. The New-FinOpsCostExport command is key here and now supports Parquet format through a new -Format parameter. Parquet files are columnar, compact, and significantly faster to query in tools like Azure Data Explorer, Synapse, and Fabric. You’ll also see a new -CompressionMode parameter which gives you control over gzip and snappy compression to further reduce storage costs and transfer times. Again, for the fastest data processing and lowest latency, we recommend using Parquet format with snappy compression.
Thanks to gorkomikus on GitHub for contributing this feature! They saw a gap and fixed it. That’s what community is all about!
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 Power BI reports:
- Fixed tag expansion when tag names contain special characters like colons.
- Fixed unattached disks count in the workload optimization report to show only truly unattached disks.
- Fixed "Number of Months" parameter calculation that was excluding the first 5 days of data.
- Fixed EA department scope failing on pricesheet export by skipping unsupported scopes.
In FinOps workbooks:
- Fixed SQL Managed Instance vCores displaying incorrect values in the AHB workbook.
- Changed default SQL database backup redundancy to LRS for improved cost efficiency and compatibility with non-paired Azure regions.
- Fixed reservations-related workbooks by replacing Instance Size Flexibility ratios CSV vanity URL.
- Fixed underutilized disks recommendations not being generated for Premium SSD V2 disks.
What’s next
We’ve been a bit quiet lately, but we’re still here and excited about what the future has in store. It’s been interesting to see how the silence has caused an increase in people looking to contribute to the FinOps toolkit. This is very exciting to watch this vibrant community continue to grow!
Looking ahead, you can expect continued innovation across the toolkit:
- AI automation on top of Cost Management and FinOps hubs giving you more options to getting the answers you need.
- FinOps hubs will add recommendations, a new extensibility model, and continued data quality improvements.
- Azure Optimization Engine will evolve as its capabilities are integrated into FinOps hubs.
To support this momentum, I’m also working on a set of premium, paid services designed to help organizations deploy, customize, and scale the FinOps toolkit with confidence. Whether you need help getting started, tailoring the tools to your environment, or ensuring long-term success, these services are built to meet you where you are – strategic, secure, and ready to deliver value from day one. Connect with me directly on LinkedIn or FinOps Foundation Slack to learn more.
