Sharing Azure Cost Data Before Onboarding

If you want a commitment savings analysis before connecting your Azure account, you can export your cost data from the Azure portal and send it to us. This page explains which export to create and how to check it before sending.

You probably don't need this page. If you're ready to connect your Azure account, onboarding using the Azure CLI sets up the cost export automatically and keeps it current. A manual export is a point-in-time snapshot that has to be repeated by hand.

Use this page if you want an analysis before granting access, or if your Azure account isn't eligible for a direct integration yet.

What the analysis needs

To model commitment savings, the data has to answer four questions for every workload:

What service is running? (Virtual Machines, SQL Database, App Service, and so on)
What tier or SKU? This determines whether the resource can be covered by a reservation or savings plan at all.
What does it cost at pay-as-you-go rates? This is the baseline savings are measured against.
Is it already committed? Existing reservations and savings plans have to be excluded so we don't count the same savings twice.

An export that can't answer all four produces an incomplete picture. The two options below both work; the first is better.

Option A — FOCUS export (recommended)

Archera reads Azure cost data in FOCUS format, the FinOps Foundation's open standard for billing data, which Microsoft supports natively. A FOCUS export answers all four questions in a single file and is the same format our integration uses, so nothing has to be translated or mapped by hand.

What you need: the Cost Management Contributor role on the subscription or billing account, and an Azure Storage account the export can write to. (Cost Management Reader can view costs but cannot create exports.)

Sign in to portal.azure.com.
Go to Cost Management + Billing → Cost Management → Exports.
Select + Create.
For Type of data, choose Cost and usage details (FOCUS).
For Dataset version, choose 1.2-preview if it's available. If it isn't, any FOCUS version works — see the note below.
Set Frequency to Monthly export of last month's costs for a historical baseline, or Daily export of month-to-date costs to keep it current.
Choose your storage account, container, and directory. Use CSV format.
Create the export, then use Run now to generate data for past months. Azure can backfill up to 13 months depending on your scope. Three full calendar months is a good baseline.
Send us the generated files, or grant us read access to the container.

Which FOCUS version? Ask for 1.2 if the portal offers it, but don't worry if it doesn't. Azure also offers versions 1.0, 1.0r2, and 1.0-preview(v1), and all of them contain what the analysis needs. There is no 1.1 version in Azure. Send whichever version your scope supports rather than delaying the export.

Set the scope as high as you can. Exporting at the billing account or management group level covers every subscription in one file, and automatically includes subscriptions you add later. Exporting per-subscription means one export per subscription, and gaps when new ones appear.

Not every Azure account type supports FOCUS exports. Legacy plans such as Microsoft Online Services Program (MOSP), and unpaid subscriptions such as Azure Credit for MSDN subscribers, will be rejected when you try to create the export. See Supported Account / Subscription Types to check yours. If FOCUS isn't available to you, use Option B.

Option B — Cost analysis download

If you can't create a storage account, you can download a resource-level file directly. This works, but it uses Azure's older cost schema, so we have to map the columns manually and the analysis takes longer.

Sign in to portal.azure.com.
Go to Cost Management + Billing → Cost analysis.
Change the View to Resources — not the default summary view. Make sure Include nested data is checked.
Set the date range to the most recent full calendar month.
Set Granularity to None.
Select Export → Download as Excel (.xlsx).
Repeat for each subscription, and for each of the last three months.

Send one file per subscription per month. Please leave the Summary tab in the file intact — it records the subscription and date range, which helps us confirm we're looking at the right data.

If you buy Azure through a partner or reseller

If you purchase Azure through a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partner, a distributor, or a reseller such as CDW, SHI, or Insight, your billing data may live in their system rather than in your Azure portal. You may not be able to create either export above.

In that case, ask your partner for one of the following, in order of preference:

The usage-based charges reconciliation file from Partner Center for the last three billing periods. This is the most detailed option and only they can pull it.
A resource-level cost export for the last three months, including subscription ID and name, resource name, resource type, resource group, billing period, and cost in USD.
Their customer invoice detail report filtered to Microsoft products, if they bill you through a distributor.

Your partner may also be able to run the FOCUS export in Option A on your behalf. That's the best outcome if they're willing.

Before you send: a quick check

Open the file and confirm:

There's a column identifying the service for each row, not just a resource group or resource name. Resource group names like prod-sql-cluster are suggestive, but we don't model savings from naming conventions.
There's a column identifying the SKU, tier, or meter. Without it we can't tell a reservable SKU from a non-reservable one.
Each file covers one complete month. If a single file contains several months of data, it's a year-to-date export — send the individual monthly files instead.
The month is complete. An export run mid-month understates spend and skews the analysis.

If you're sending a FOCUS export, these columns are already present under their FOCUS names — ServiceName, SkuId, SkuPriceId, BilledCost, EffectiveCost, PricingCategory, and the CommitmentDiscount columns.

What won't work

These come up often, so it's worth saying explicitly. None of them contain enough detail to model savings:

Screenshots of the Azure cost dashboard
Power BI reports or exports
Azure invoice PDFs — not machine-readable, and no line-item detail
Pivot tables or spend summaries — pre-aggregating removes the resource detail the analysis needs
Azure Advisor recommendation exports — useful context, but not a billing data source
Azure reservation reports — these show existing commitments only, not pay-as-you-go spend
Cost analysis downloads set to daily granularity — many more rows with no added value. Request None instead. (This doesn't apply to FOCUS exports, where daily rows are the normal format.)

If you're not sure what you have, send the file as it came out of the portal. Raw is always better than reformatted.

Which services can be covered

Not every Azure service and SKU is eligible for a reservation or savings plan, and a few common cases surprise people — Managed Disks are only reservable at P30 and above, and Azure SQL Database is reservable on vCore but not DTU. For details:

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Last updated 14 days ago

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