FinOps Intelligence

Purpose

Unified cost intelligence skill that identifies savings opportunities, tracks cost trends, and generates chargeback/showback reports by team or project.

Procedure

Step 1: Cost trend overview

az costmanagement query --type ActualCost --timeframe MonthToDate \
  --scope "subscriptions/<sub-id>" \
  --dataset-aggregation '{"totalCost":{"name":"Cost","function":"Sum"}}' \
  --dataset-grouping name="ServiceName" type="Dimension" -o table

Summarize: total spend this month vs. last month (% change), top 5 services by spend, spending anomalies (day-over-day spikes > 20%).

Step 2: Orphaned resources (waste)

Step 3: Rightsizing

Identify VMs with < 5% avg CPU (14 days), App Service plans with < 20% utilization, databases with < 20% DTU/vCore. Calculate current vs. recommended SKU cost.

Step 4: Reservation opportunities

List VMs and databases running 24/7 for 30+ days as candidates for Reserved Instances (up to 72% savings).

Step 5: Storage optimization

az storage account list --query "[].{name:name, accessTier:accessTier, kind:kind}" -o table

Identify blobs not accessed in 90+ days (candidates for Cool/Archive). Check lifecycle policies.

Step 6: Cost allocation (chargeback)

Group costs by the user's chosen tag (cost-center, owner, team, application). Track untagged resources as "Unallocated." For each team: this period vs. previous, top cost driver, flag anomalies > 30% increase.

Sample output

References

• Cost Management: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/costs/overview-cost-management
• Azure Advisor Cost: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/advisor/advisor-cost-recommendations
• Reserved Instances: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/reservations/save-compute-costs-reservations