What's new in FinOps toolkit 12

FinOps toolkit 12 shipped in July 2025, and it’s a release about keeping pace: with the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS), with cost, and with the audiences who need to see cost data without opening a query editor.

FOCUS 1.2 support, end to end

The month before, Microsoft Cost Management added FOCUS 1.2 support. FinOps toolkit 12 catches the rest of the stack up: updated FOCUS documentation, Power BI reports, FinOps hubs ingestion, and a downloadable FOCUS 1.2 metadata file describing every column in the spec.

The practical changes: a new ServiceSubcategory column, three renamed columns (InvoiceId, PricingCurrency, SkuMeter), and a handful of columns Cost Management defines but doesn’t populate yet. Power BI reports carry both the old and new column names during the transition, so existing reports keep working whether your export is on FOCUS 1.0 or 1.2.

A new schema version in FinOps hubs, without breaking anything

FinOps hubs organizes its dataset by schema version, and this release adds a v1_2 schema aligned to FOCUS 1.2 alongside the existing v1_0. Every table and function is named for its version, like Costs_v1_0 and Costs_v1_2; the unversioned Costs function always points at the latest one, which just moved from v1_0 to v1_2.

If your reports and integrations already use versioned functions, as we’ve always recommended, upgrading changes nothing. If you’re on the unversioned functions, switch to the _v1_0 versions to keep exactly the behavior you had before, or move to _v1_2 when you’re ready for the new columns: CapacityReservationId, CapacityReservationStatus, CommitmentDiscountQuantity, CommitmentDiscountUnit, ServiceSubcategory, SkuPriceDetails, plus FinOps-hubs-computed fields like discount/savings percentages, commitment discount utilization, and Azure Hybrid Benefit detail. Native cloud FOCUS extensions for Alibaba and Tencent round out coverage alongside AWS, GCP, and OCI.

Any Cost Management FOCUS export version works with FinOps hubs; older exports get transformed to the latest schema automatically, and none of your historical data needs to be reprocessed. Adopt FOCUS once, and let the platform absorb the spec’s evolution instead of pushing it back onto every report you’ve built. If you’re extending FinOps hubs with custom queries and want the full mechanics (including the decimal → real datatype change in v1_2), the schema-versioning deep dive linked below covers it.

Data Explorer auto-start: pay for compute only when you use it

Azure Data Explorer clusters bill hourly whether or not they’re actively ingesting or being queried, which makes them a natural target for scale-to-zero. The catch has always been the reverse: once a cluster is stopped, someone has to notice and restart it before new data can land. FinOps hubs 12 closes that gap. The ingestion pipeline now checks cluster status and starts it automatically when new data arrives, adding roughly 10 minutes to that pipeline run. That’s a small cost against running the cluster continuously.

An executive summary in the Cost summary report

The Cost summary Power BI report gets a new Summary page built for a leadership audience: top 10 subscriptions, resource groups, and service categories by spend, a monthly usage breakdown by pricing category, and a 30-day daily spend trend. The original summary page is renamed Running total and keeps its cumulative view. One report now serves both the practitioner who needs the trend line and the executive who needs the top-line numbers.

Other changes worth knowing about

• Flexible CIDR support for FinOps hubs private endpoints (any subnet from /8 to /26), removing a common deployment blocker for Power BI VNet data gateways.
• Managed exports are now off by default, so FinOps hubs no longer requires an elevated permissions grant unless you explicitly opt in.
• PowerShell Cost Management export commands default to the latest GA API version and FOCUS 1.2-preview.
• The versioning scheme itself changed: what would have been “0.12” is now just “12,” reflecting that the toolkit is a suite of nine tools moving together, not one tool with a version number.

What it means for your team

None of this requires action if your reports already use versioned functions and your hub is stable. If you’re planning a FOCUS 1.2 migration, running FinOps hubs at scale, or weighing whether to enable Data Explorer auto-start, that’s exactly the kind of decision Allyte’s people, who maintain and govern the Microsoft FinOps toolkit, help teams work through.