FinOps toolkit 14 connects AI to your FinOps hub data with a Copilot Studio agent template, ingests recommendations from Azure Advisor and your own Resource Graph queries, simplifies hub deployment, and previews a new commitment discount eligibility dataset.

Whether you consider yourself a FinOps practitioner, someone enthusiastic about driving cloud efficiency, or were just tasked with reducing cloud costs, the FinOps toolkit has something for you. This release is focused on three themes: connecting AI to your FinOps data with a Copilot Studio agent template, adding optimization recommendations to FinOps hubs from Azure Advisor and custom Resource Graph queries, and previewing commitment discount eligibility data for reservation and savings plan planning. Read on for details.

New to the FinOps toolkit?

The FinOps toolkit is an open-source collection of tools and resources helping organizations learn, adopt, and implement FinOps in the Microsoft Cloud. The foundation includes the Implementing FinOps guide for getting started with native Azure portal tools or custom FinOps solutions. Learn more at the FinOps toolkit documentation.

Build your own FinOps agent in Copilot Studio

Alongside Power BI reports, real-time dashboards, and the GitHub Copilot plugin, v14 adds a new way to engage with your hub data: a purpose-built Copilot Studio agent template for creating a FinOps hub agent that surfaces inside Microsoft 365 Copilot. It's aimed primarily at non-technical audiences – project and product managers, senior IT and business leaders, and finance teams – who need to break down the numbers and KPIs behind the dashboards and ask open-ended questions about trends, anomalies, and historical cost evolution. A Microsoft 365 Copilot license is not strictly required to use the agent, which makes it practical to roll out broadly across the organization. By making cloud cost analysis approachable for everyone, the agent becomes a real lever for FinOps culture and enablement, not just another reporting surface.

The template includes everything you need to stand up a working agent in an afternoon: structured agent instructions tuned for Claude Opus 4.6, a schema reference so the agent generates valid KQL against the v1_2 schema, a query catalog of common FinOps questions, and a guide for delivering weekly cost reports. The agent translates natural language questions into validated KQL, runs them against your hub, and returns structured analysis on cloud spend, commitment discounts, anomalies, and optimization opportunities.

Because the agent uses end-user credentials when it talks to Data Explorer, every query is governed by your existing RBAC settings. The agent only sees what the person asking can already see. That means you can roll it out broadly without a separate access review.

To get started, see Configure a FinOps hub agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Recommendations come to FinOps hubs

FinOps hubs have always been great at telling you what you spent. With v14, they can also tell you what to do about it. The new recommendations pipeline ingests Azure Advisor cost recommendations alongside a built-in catalog of Resource Graph queries that surface common waste – stopped VMs, unattached disks, idle load balancers, empty NSGs, orphaned NAT gateways, underutilized resources, and more – and lands them in a single managed dataset next to reservation recommendations from Cost Management.

The pipeline is intentionally simple: a daily trigger walks the config/queries folder in hub storage, runs each query file against Azure Resource Graph, and ingests the results into the Recommendations dataset. Built-in queries are enabled by default, with a few opt-in queries (Azure Hybrid Benefit, AKS spot VMs) gated behind deployment parameters so they only run where they apply.

The bigger story is custom recommendations. Because every query is just a JSON file with a Resource Graph query and a few metadata fields, you can drop in your own recommendations – Contoso-specific naming conventions, idle Cosmos DB accounts, oversized App Service plans, whatever your environment needs – and they'll show up in the same dataset, styled the same way, alongside the built-ins. To disable a default recommendation, just delete its query file. No code, no pipeline edits.

To learn more, see Configure FinOps hubs recommendations.

A simpler hub deployment experience

The FinOps hub deployment UI has accumulated a few too many knobs over the years, and it showed: it was easy to end up with conflicting selections (like configuring Data Explorer settings on a hub that wouldn't actually use them) or to miss the Remote Hub option entirely. v14 consolidates hub mode into a single radio button group with four mutually exclusive options: None (storage only, for Power BI reports), Azure Data Explorer, Microsoft Fabric, or Remote Hub.

The UI now hides settings that don't apply to your selection. Pick Azure Data Explorer and you'll see SKU and retention settings; pick anything else and they're gone. Pick Remote Hub and the storage URI, storage key, and purge protection fields move up to the Basics tab where the dependency is obvious. It's a small change that makes a big difference for first-time deployments and walks new users through the right set of decisions for their scenario.

Preview: Commitment discount eligibility data

Reservation and savings plan planning typically starts with a question that's surprisingly hard to answer: which of my meters are even eligible for a commitment discount, and what kind? The Azure Retail Prices API has the raw data, but you have to know which fields to look at and how to interpret them across services and regions.

v14 introduces a new Commitment discount eligibility open data dataset that does the work for you. It's a pre-computed lookup, sourced from the Retail Prices API, that tells you per meter whether reservations and savings plans apply, what terms are available, and which SKUs they cover. Drop it next to your usage data and you can quickly identify candidates for commitment discounts without re-deriving the eligibility logic in every report.

This dataset is shipping as a preview. The data is generated, but we're still validating coverage and accuracy across the breadth of Azure services. If you find a meter that looks wrong, missing, or surprising, please open an issue – your feedback is what gets it from preview to GA.

Other new and noteworthy updates

In the Implementing FinOps guide:

• Added EA enrollment 403 troubleshooting steps to the common errors page.
• Updated the FinOps Foundation video on the overview page.
• Removed all references to the retired FinOps e-book.

In FinOps hubs:

• Added typed metadata contracts between hub apps to formalize dependencies and enable compile-time verification.
• Fixed Init-DataFactory deployment script failing when an Event Grid subscription is already provisioning.
• Fixed msexports_ExecuteETLpipeline failing on empty export files.
• Fixed Data Explorer dashboard cost and savings KPIs producing invalid sums in multi-billing-currency tenants by adding a Currency parameter.
• Fixed hub deployment failure in US Government cloud regions caused by missing region-to-time-zone mappings.
• Documented the <ingestionId>__<originalFileName>.parquetfilename convention, full-folder replacement requirement, and manifest content rules for ingesting custom FOCUS datasets.

In Power BI reports:

• Fixed Power BI storage report refresh errors caused by unrecognized Termvalues like P10Y (10-year reservations).

In FinOps workbooks:

• Excluded dev/test subscriptions from Azure Hybrid Benefit reports to align with licensing requirements.
• Fixed Azure Hybrid Benefit reports to include Windows VMs from all publishers, not just Microsoft-published images.
• Fixed broken feedback link in the Optimization workbook.

In Azure optimization engine:

• Upgraded the EA/MCA Pricesheet API version (the previous version is being deprecated June 1, 2026).
• Improved retail prices export resilience with retry logic, streaming each response page directly to CSV, and periodic progress logging during long exports.

In the PowerShell module:

• Added -WhatIfsupport for resource provider registration in New-FinOpsCostExport.
• Fixed inverted verbose logging in Start-FinOpsCostExportthat showed blank dates when a date range was specified.

What's next

Looking ahead, expect continued momentum across the toolkit:

• Deeper AI integration on top of Cost Management and FinOps hubs, with more ways to get answers from your data.

• FinOps hubs will add FOCUS 1.4 support alongside continued data catalog expansion, extensibility improvements, and data quality work.

• Azure Optimization Engine capabilities will continue migrating into FinOps hubs.

Premium paid services are also in development to help organizations deploy, customize, and scale the FinOps toolkit with confidence. Connect on LinkedIn or FinOps Foundation Slack to learn more.