From Azure invoice to actionable savings — in under 15 minutes.

Next to nothing. CloudMonitor's platform runs entirely in our Microsoft Fabric tenancy — no Fabric capacity for you to license, no Hubs deployment, no compute or managed app in your tenant. The only Azure resource you create is one storage account that receives your scheduled cost exports; CloudMonitor reads it in place and needs nothing else. The annual license covers the Fabric capacity we run for you, and your team just gets a hosted SaaS URL and a Fabric app.

CloudMonitor is a hosted SaaS platform running in our Microsoft Fabric tenancy. Your billing data stays in the storage account you own. CloudMonitor reads it in place through a OneLake shortcut, read-only, and never makes a second copy. The CloudMonitor environment that reads it and serves your reports runs in the data residency region you choose at sign-up — encrypted in transit and at rest. Every customer gets a dedicated Microsoft Fabric workspace, so your data lives in its own isolated workspace and is never co-mingled with another customer's. CloudMonitor staff access is restricted, audited, and gated by least-privilege controls, and only your authorized users see your reports.

You configure a FOCUS cost export to an Azure Storage account in your tenant and grant CloudMonitor scoped read-only access to it. CloudMonitor ingests that export into your dedicated Microsoft Fabric workspace, where it becomes your reports. Only billing and resource metadata moves — never the data inside your resources. See the Information Trust Center for the full data-flow detail.

Read-only, scoped to your billing data. You can limit it to specific subscriptions and revoke it from the Azure portal at any time. CloudMonitor has no write access to your workloads or the data inside your services. The one exception is a tightly scoped management role on the single storage account that receives your cost exports, used only to set up that export. Nothing else in your environment is writable by CloudMonitor.

Yes. FOCUS is the native schema, and CloudMonitor always tracks the latest version Microsoft Cost Management exports — currently FOCUS 1.2, which Azure publishes as its 1.2-preview schema alongside the generally available 1.0 export. See Microsoft's FOCUS metadata reference for the current Azure schema. If you already have a FOCUS export in Azure Storage, CloudMonitor reads it directly. As we add Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, we'll support the latest published FOCUS specification for those clouds too — so your Azure, AWS, and GCP spend all normalize to one schema.

Most customers are live within 15 minutes — the setup guide walks through each step. The longest step is usually getting access approval through your change-management process.

Connection takes under fifteen minutes — sign up, point CloudMonitor at your FOCUS billing export, grant scoped read-only access to the billing scope. The first set of reports populates the same day. A FinOps Assessment in the admin app gives a Crawl, Walk, Run baseline per Capability after the first refresh, so you can plan the practice maturity path from week one.