Domain 1 · Understand Usage and Cost
Every bill, every billing day, in one place.
Data Ingestion is the foundation of every other Capability. CloudMonitor pulls FOCUS-formatted billing data daily, validates it on every refresh, and backfills to the first invoice — so every downstream report starts from numbers that reconcile.
The problem
Billing data nobody can trust.
CSVs nobody can join.
Cost exports land in storage, get joined by hand, drift from the portal totals within a week.
Silent refresh failures.
A failed daily refresh means yesterday's report quietly becomes a five-day-old report.
Multi-cloud, multi-shape.
Every provider's export looks different until something normalises them. FOCUS does — if you've built the pipeline.
How CloudMonitor answers
A pipeline you don't have to maintain.
FOCUS-native ingest.
FOCUS 1.2 schema for Azure and AWS, FOCUS 1.0 onward elsewhere. The same columns mean the same thing across every provider.
Validated on every refresh.
Row counts, reconciled totals, and schema drift checks run before any report is published. Failures surface to the practitioner, not the audience.
Backfill to first invoice.
Year-on-year trends on day one — not after twelve months of data has accrued in the new tool.
Beyond cloud bills.
SaaS, licensing, marketplace, and private-cloud feeds land in the same schema — the scope expansion the State of FinOps 2026 calls out as table stakes.
Outcomes
What good ingest looks like.
Daily
FOCUS refresh, validated
9+
Providers with FOCUS exports
Day 1
Backfilled history
Related Capabilities
More in the Understand Usage and Cost Domain.
Allocation
Cost groups, virtual tags, and shared-cost splits without renaming a single Azure resource.
Reporting and Analytics
30+ pre-built Power BI reports, tunable per audience.
All Understand Usage and Cost Capabilities
See every Capability in this Domain side by side.
The ingestion path, in pictures
From your billing export to a Power BI dashboard.
The historical Power BI setup flow — how CloudMonitor connects Power BI to the analytics engine over a daily ingest of the FOCUS billing export.
The path
From a FOCUS billing export to a live dashboard.
CloudMonitor ingests your Azure billing through scoped, read-only FOCUS exports, processes it in our Microsoft Fabric tenancy, and serves it back as Power BI reports — no pipeline for you to build.
The result
Power BI reports, connected and refreshed.
30+ pre-built reports arrive connected to your data and refresh on a daily cadence — yours to customize, with row-level security already wired in.
Self-serve
Point your own Power BI at the same model.
Analysts who live in Power BI can connect directly to the CloudMonitor semantic model and build their own views on the same governed data.
Source: this page interprets the Understand Usage and Cost domain published by the FinOps Foundation, licensed under CC BY 4.0. The wording, examples, and product mapping on this page are CloudMonitor’s own.
See ingest reconciled live to the Azure portal.
The demo tenant ships with a refresh log so you can see validation in action.
