Office hours: a Power BI bug that broke every refresh

A smaller group this time, but two things worth flagging if you run the FinOps toolkit’s Power BI reports or you’re trying to make sense of Copilot spend.

The bug that broke every refresh

One attendee tracked down a FinOps toolkit deployment where Power BI refreshes were failing outright. The cause: a SKU_Term field that needed to be text, not a number. A single data-type mismatch was enough to break the whole refresh silently, with no obvious pointer to the actual field. If your own refresh is failing for no visible reason, check your field types before you assume the data itself is bad.

Copilot cost data is coming to the toolkit

The harder problem right now: a customer trying to meter GitHub Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot usage against a discounted allotment, with no per-user visibility into who’s consuming what. Another attendee confirmed this is an active gap being worked on, pulling per-user cost and usage data from both Copilot APIs into the toolkit, targeted for later this quarter.

A smaller, good-news anecdote in the same vein: an attendee described asking VS Code a routine cost question and having it automatically invoke the FinOps toolkit’s own MCP server mid-conversation, unprompted, and answer more completely and accurately than expected. The tooling working quietly in the background is sometimes the best kind of feature.

Copilot cost visibility is clearly a live gap across the ecosystem right now, not just a toolkit todo. Come compare notes at the next office hours, every other Wednesday.