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Monitor Fabric Costs With Fabric Cost Analysis

Following on from my blog post a few months ago about cool stuff in the Fabric Toolbox, there is now another really useful solution available there that anyone with Fabric capacities should check out: Fabric Cost Analysis (or FCA). If you have Fabric capacities it’s important to be able to monitor your Azure costs relating to them, so why not monitor your Fabric costs using a solution built using Fabric itself? This is what the folks behind FCA (who include Romain Casteres, author of this very useful blog post on FinOps for Fabric, plus Cédric Dupui, Manel Omani and Antoine Richet) decided to build and share freely with the community.

A lot of enhancements are planned for the future – I’m told there’s another big release planned for the end of October 2025 – but it’s already quite mature. Not only do you get all the ETL to extract cost data from Azure and Power BI reports you need but there’s also a Fabric Data Agent so you can query your data in natural language!

Aren’t Fabric costs straightforward? Don’t you just pay a flat fee for each capacity? In a lot of cases yes, but there can be complications: you might be pausing and resuming capacities or scaling them up or down. There can also be other costs you might not realise you’re incurring. For example if you’ve ever read any of Matthew Farrow’s excellent content on Fabric costs, such as this post on the cost implications of pausing a capacity, and wondered whether you’ve been charged extra for pausing a throttled capacity, then FCA can answer that question:

Like FUAM this is not an official Microsoft product but a solution accelerator with no official support, but it’s definitely a much better option than building something yourself or not monitoring your costs at all.