Stage 2 · Lesson 2 of 7

Cost Management exports

deliver cost data to an Azure Storage account on a daily or monthly schedule, as or . The datasets include cost and usage details in actual, amortised and form (FOCUS combines actual and amortised), price sheets and reservation data.

Large exports are split into parts with a manifest file listing them. Through the portal you can rerun an export for past months, up to 13 months back. This is the data your reports, the FinOps toolkit and any custom tools should read.

Common trapbuilding reports from manual CSV downloads that someone forgets to refresh.

A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come with the full roadmap. Unlock

Resources for this stage

Start with· follow one of these

CourseFree
Microsoft Learn FinOps modules
Microsoft · Beginner
Free: the "Understand cloud usage and cost" unit of Adopt FinOps on Azure
BookPaid
Cloud FinOps, 2nd edition (O'Reilly)
O'Reilly Media · Intermediate · Paid book
Paid: the chapters on allocation and tagging strategy explain the reasoning behind a good policy

Practise

Microsoft FinOps toolkit
Free sample cost exports to practise queries on, whichever cloud you chose
DuckDB Documentation
Query a billing CSV or Parquet file with SQL on your laptop, no database to set up

Keep handy

Microsoft Cost Management documentation
The official Cost Management, Billing and Advisor docs for every Azure tool named in this stage
FOCUS: the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification
Learn the common column names now; they make every provider's export easier to read

Also worth your time

Tutorial: Create and manage Cost Management exports (opens in a new tab)Read
Datasets, schedules, formats and how to backfill past months
Kimball Dimensional Modeling TechniquesGo deeper
If you will build cost data models, the classic patterns for facts and dimensions apply directly