Welcome back to our Indispensable Azure Tools series. This time, we’re diving into the Microsoft FinOps Toolkit, a practical and open-source solution to help you stay in control of Azure costs while keeping automation front and center.
If you’re managing Azure in an automated environment, cloud cost management is part of the daily work. The Microsoft FinOps Toolkit is designed to bring structure, visibility and efficiency to that process. the FinOps toolkit helps you monitor and optimize your Azure cloud spend using templates and dashboards that plug into your existing DevOps setup.
At its core, the FinOps Toolkit supports real-world FinOps practices. It includes starter kits to get you going quickly, scripts to automate tasks like cost center setup or budget enforcement, and a set of reporting tools that let you visualize usage and spot inefficiencies. FinOps hubs centralize data from across subscriptions, and the Power BI templates help teams get insights without having to build reports from scratch.
The Charge Breakdown report provides a clear view of Azure costs by resource, service, and tag, helping teams quickly identify where money is being spent
What makes this toolkit valuable is how it bridges the gap between teams. Finance, engineering, and leadership often speak different languages when it comes to cost. This toolkit gives everyone access to the same data, presented in a way that supports decision-making. It helps identify idle resources, track usage patterns, and act before costs spiral.
For example, if your organization uses multiple Azure subscriptions for different departments or projects, the FinOps Toolkit can help unify cost data across them. This allows you to spot trends like overprovisioned resources in test environments or services left running after project completion. Teams can create custom reports segmented by tags, cost centers, or business units to drive internal accountability.
It’s also designed with automation in mind. You can integrate the toolkit directly into your CI/CD pipelines or Infrastructure as Code workflows. This means cost governance happens from the start, budgets can be set at deployment time, tagging rules can be enforced, and cost reporting can be automated as part of your release process. This is particularly useful in environments where developers have self-service access to deploy resources.
The Inventory View gives a detailed list of all active resources, making it easier to track usage, validate tagging, and spot cost optimization opportunities.
The toolkit is compatible with Azure Commercial, Azure Government, and Azure China. And because it’s open source on Github, you can fully customize it, extend scripts, build new connectors, or adjust reports to reflect internal standards. It also plays well with Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and external reporting platforms if you want to go beyond Power BI.
Getting started is very straightforward. You can explore the toolkit on GitHub, start with a basic setup for budget tracking, or roll out the full FinOps hub for enterprise-wide reporting. There’s solid documentation, active community support, and regular updates that keep the toolkit evolving with the Azure platform.
What makes the FinOps Toolkit truly valuable is how practical it is and gives your IT team the tools to automate, analyze, and optimize cloud spending without slowing down delivery. It’s a great example of how a community project is helping engineering and finance almost speak the same language through automation.
This post is part of the Indispensable Azure Tools series by DevOps Masterminds. Explore the full series here.
Stay tuned as we roll out more indispensable tools to power up your Azure cloud journey!