Monitoring costs in Microsoft Fabric can be trickier than it first appears. You might assume it’s just a flat fee per capacity (easy, right?), but real-world usage tends to add complexity. Maybe you pause and resume a capacity, scale it up or down, or leverage extra features – suddenly you’re wondering where those additional charges came from. Many organizations struggle to distinguish which costs are included in their Fabric capacity and which aren’t. They also want guidance on optimizing resources and practicing good FinOps (Financial Operations) like chargeback and showback to internal teams.
This complexity matters because Microsoft Fabric is the fastest-growing unified data platform in Microsoft’s history, now adopted by over 28,000 customers. Yet for many organizations, the capacity model remains one of the biggest obstacles to adoption. Understanding what’s included versus what’s not, the real impact of reservations, and how Azure quotas affect usage and cost is genuinely hard—and that uncertainty slows down expansion.
Enter Fabric Cost Analysis (FCA) – a free, open-source solution available to everyone on a Microsoft GitHub repository, designed to shine a light on all your Microsoft Fabric costs. FCA was developed by a multidisciplinary team (Cedric Dupui, Manel Omani, Antoine Richet, and led by Romain Casteres) with expertise spanning FinOps, Data, and Go-To-Market, with a clear goal: turn a major adoption barrier into a strategic lever for growth.
Conceived directly from customer questions, FCA answers the things people actually want to know: What are we really paying for? What’s included? Where are the optimization opportunities? It doesn’t just track costs—it builds trust, helps organizations explain spend internally, and ultimately accelerates Fabric adoption.
Built entirely on Fabric itself (talk about eating your own dog food!), FCA demonstrates the platform’s power end-to-end and highlights the use of GenAI through an agentic experience, allowing users to access cost insights in natural language. Deployed at several customers, FCA has been presented to the global community at FabCon in Vienna, the AI Tour in Latin America, and across various community events around the world. The aim is simple: enable everyone to confidently control the cost of the Fabric platform.
Important: Keep in mind that FCA is a solution accelerator, not an official Microsoft product. That means it’s community-supported and carries no formal Microsoft support. It’s been shared freely with the community to help Fabric users, but you use it at your own risk (in practice it’s quite robust, but if something breaks, you’ll be relying on community help). Now, let’s break down what FCA offers and how it works.
Content
In this post, we’ll cover the main aspects of the Fabric Cost Analysis tool: its architecture, the data it uses as inputs, the outputs it provides (reports and a nifty data agent), and how you can set it up and get support. By the end, you should have a clear picture of how FCA can help you monitor and optimize your Fabric costs—and remove friction from Fabric adoption.
Architecture
Figure: High-level architecture of the Fabric Cost Analysis (FCA) solution.
This diagram shows how cost and usage data flows through Microsoft Fabric. Cost data (such as Azure billing info) is ingested via Fabric Pipelines and Notebooks into a Fabric Lakehouse, where it’s stored both in raw form and as optimized Delta Parquet files. This dual storage (raw and curated) allows Power BI’s Direct Lake to access the data directly for analytics, enabling fast and interactive cost reporting.
There’s even a built-in Fabric Data Agent (think of it like an AI assistant for your data) on top of the FCA data model. In short, FCA uses Fabric to monitor Fabric—a self-referential approach that showcases the platform’s capabilities while solving a very real business problem.
FCA Inputs
FCA gathers a variety of data and loads it into your Fabric Lakehouse to analyze costs from multiple angles. The key inputs include:
- Azure cost data in FOCUS format: FCA pulls Azure billing details using the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS), providing a normalized, analysis-ready cost model.
- Enriched documentation data: Reference data from Microsoft Learn documentation adds context and definitions, making reports easier to understand.
- Azure Reservations (optional): If you use reservations for Fabric capacities, FCA shows whether they’re actually delivering savings.
- Azure Quotas (optional): Quota data helps you understand usage versus limits—critical for both cost control and capacity planning.
Note: FCA is scoped exclusively to Microsoft Fabric costs. Unrelated Azure services are filtered out, keeping the focus exactly where it belongs.
FCA Outputs
Once the data is collected and processed, FCA delivers two primary outputs: a comprehensive Power BI report and a Fabric Data Agent that allows natural-language exploration of your cost data. Together, they support classic FinOps scenarios—inform, optimize, and operate—while making cost conversations easier across technical and business teams.
Report
Figure: Example of an FCA report page (the “Summary” page).
Each report page focuses on a different aspect of Fabric cost management. The Home page provides a high-level snapshot, clearly separating costs covered by capacity from additional charges—making it much easier to explain spend internally. The Summary page breaks down costs by capacity and region, helping organizations understand how usage is distributed.
Other pages include Capacity Usage (to identify under- or over-utilization), Reservations (to validate savings), Cost Detail (for granular analysis and forecasting), Quotas (to track limits and usage), and a Support page that explains billing nuances and metrics. You can use the reports as-is or extend them using the underlying data model.
Data Agent
Figure: Example of data agent communication in both English and French.
One of FCA’s most powerful features is its Fabric Data Agent integration. This agentic, GenAI-powered experience allows users to ask questions like:
- “Which Fabric capacities cost the most this quarter?”
- “How have my Fabric costs trended over the last six months?”
The Data Agent retrieves answers directly from the FCA semantic model, making cost analysis accessible even to non-technical users. It works in multiple languages and can be accessed via the web or Microsoft Teams. This capability reinforces FCA’s core mission: remove friction, build confidence, and make cost transparency part of everyday decision-making.
Setup
Getting started with FCA is intentionally simple. The solution is delivered through the Microsoft Fabric Toolbox on GitHub and includes an automated, guided deployment process. A one-click deployment sets up pipelines, notebooks, the Lakehouse, datasets, and reports. Check it out here.
As long as you have the appropriate Fabric workspace permissions and an Azure subscription for billing data, deployment typically takes just minutes. Many users start with a limited scope to explore the solution, then expand to full production once comfortable.
Support
Because FCA is a community-driven solution, support happens openly on GitHub. Bugs, questions, and feature requests are handled through GitHub issues, which also serve as the project backlog. The team actively monitors feedback and incorporates improvements over time.
One important reminder: do not open Microsoft support tickets for FCA. Instead, use the GitHub repository, where both the creators and the broader community can help.
Final Thoughts
Fabric Cost Analysis turns one of the most common frustrations with Microsoft Fabric—cost transparency—into a strength. Built by practitioners, shaped by customers, and shared freely with the community, FCA helps organizations understand what they’re paying for, optimize usage, and confidently scale Fabric.
If you’re running Microsoft Fabric capacities, FCA is well worth deploying. It demystifies billing, highlights optimization opportunities, and helps teams move from hesitation to expansion—exactly what a modern FinOps-driven platform needs.
Check out the demo presentation available on YouTube : Fabric Cost Analysis.
Happy cost optimizing.
The post Fabric Cost Analysis (FCA) first appeared on James Serra's Blog.