Use tags to drill into Azure Enterprise Billing with Power BI

Whilst Power BI's Azure Enterprise Content Pack gives you pre-built dashboards to expose your Azure Enterprise costs, it may not provide the level of detail required to really drill-down into the finer detail of resource costs for your Azure subscriptions.

What if you wanted to tag resources to identify those that belong to your enterprises products or services and report on costs for each. For example, perhaps you'd like to be able to find out how much was spent on Azure Compute resources (Virtual Machines) and storage during the first month of an online service that you've just launched. Your VMs might be spread across Resource Groups, with their storage being held in storage accounts in multiple regions. In order to easily differentiate those resources that are dedicated to the new service from existing resources you could tag those resources as follows:

"service" : "ournewservice"

Using Microsoft's Power BI you can then connect to your Azure Enterprise billing data via the Azure Enterprise (Beta) Data Connection, see here.

The Power BI approach then enables reports and dashboards to be built that display Azure Resource costs per service, by grouping and filtering on resource tags. If you have multiple tag names, then Power BI gives you the ability to split these out into dedicated columns from which tag-specific reports can be built.