05FinOps Monitoring Solution on Microsoft Fabric
Role: Solution Engineer / FinOps
Executive summary
Built a Fabric-based FinOps solution that ingests Azure cost data, models it to the FOCUS standard, and surfaces reservation coverage and forecasts in Power BI—driving smarter reservation purchases.
- Microsoft Fabric
- Lakehouse
- Warehouse
- Dataflows
- Spark
- Power BI
- Azure Cost Management
- FOCUS
A large financial institution needed better cloud-cost visibility for Azure workloads, including reserved instances, with projections. They wanted a FinOps dashboard built on Microsoft Fabric and presented in Power BI following the FOCUS reporting standard.
- Ingest Azure Cost Management data into Fabric Data Engineering (Spark) and transform daily cost records.
- Structure data to FOCUS guidelines—by resource, tag, environment, reserved vs on-demand.
- Build Power BI reports for usage vs budget, reservation savings and underutilization.
- Enable near-real-time updates and drill-down by department/service.
- Embed FinOps best practices, including idle-resource recommendations.
Using Fabric Dataflows and Spark notebooks, I built ETL into a Lakehouse, aggregated by day/subscription/resource group, and enriched with reservation lookups to quantify savings. Results loaded into a Fabric Warehouse for Power BI. The dashboard featured summary cards (total spend, reservation savings, forecast vs budget) and interactive breakdowns, including reservation vs pay-as-you-go coverage. I worked with the client's finance and ops teams to validate requirements.
The dashboard gave granular Azure cost insight entirely within Fabric. The client saw, for example, that reservations covered 78% of compute hours—prompting optimized purchases the next quarter. Daily automated refresh cut manual effort, and the FOCUS-standard executive report let leadership gauge efficiency and spot anomalies, strengthening confidence in Fabric beyond data science.
Fabric's scalable Spark engine handled growing cost-data volumes easily. Pairing FinOps expertise with implementation matters—context like reservation savings drives action, not just raw numbers. Fabric/Power BI integration made collaboration and sharing seamless.