FOCUS Spec KB

Sample Data and Sandbox

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Sample Data and Sandbox

The FOCUS Sandbox provides anonymized real-world billing datasets from major cloud providers, giving practitioners and tool developers a safe environment to learn the spec and test implementations.

The FOCUS Sandbox

The FinOps Foundation gathered real FinOps billing data from major cloud service providers, anonymized it, and packaged it as the FOCUS Sandbox. This is the go-to resource for anyone who wants to work with FOCUS data without needing their own cloud accounts or billing exports.

Included Datasets

The sandbox contains anonymized billing data from:

  • AWS — real CUR data converted to FOCUS format
  • GCP — real BigQuery billing export data in FOCUS format
  • Oracle Cloud (OCI) — real OCI cost report data in FOCUS format
  • Microsoft Azure — sample data obtained from Microsoft’s FinOps toolkit, merged with real data

These datasets cover realistic scenarios including multiple services, regions, commitment discounts, and varied charge types — making them suitable for testing analytical queries, building dashboards, and validating tooling.

FOCUS-Sample-Data Repository

The FOCUS-Sample-Data repository (25 stars, 14 forks) is the GitHub home for sample FOCUS datasets. It’s designed for storing and sharing examples that the community can use for testing and learning.

How to Get Your Own FOCUS Data

Beyond the sandbox, each major cloud provider offers native FOCUS data exports:

AWS

Navigate to the Billing and Cost Management console → Data Exports → create a FOCUS-formatted export. Available via the console, CLI, or SDKs. AWS supports FOCUS 1.0 in general availability as of 2024.

Azure

Microsoft Azure offers a FOCUS data export from Azure Cost Management. Azure has been actively developing FOCUS support, with FOCUS 1.2 billing exports in Public Preview as of late 2025.

Google Cloud

GCP provides a FOCUS BigQuery view and Looker Template to export and visualize FOCUS-formatted cost and usage data directly from your BigQuery billing dataset.

Oracle Cloud

OCI provides FOCUS-formatted cost reports accessible through their cost management tools.

Use Cases for Sample Data

  1. Learning the spec — explore the column structure, understand how dimensions and metrics relate, see real examples of commitment discounts and charge categories
  2. Testing tools — validate that your FinOps tooling correctly ingests and processes FOCUS data
  3. Testing the validator — run the focus-validator against sample datasets to understand its output
  4. Building demos — create dashboards and reports using realistic but non-sensitive data
  5. Contribution testing — when proposing spec changes, use sample data to demonstrate how the change would work in practice

Training and Certification

The FinOps Foundation offers structured learning paths for FOCUS:

  • Introduction to FOCUS — a free course covering the specification overview, benefits, and implementation process
  • FOCUS Analyst Certification — a deeper dive into data schemas, transformation workflows, and practical use cases

Key Points

  • The sandbox uses real, anonymized billing data — not synthetic data — for maximum realism
  • Sample data covers all four major cloud providers
  • Each provider now supports native FOCUS exports, reducing the need for the focus-converter
  • The FOCUS-Sample-Data repo is community-accessible and welcomes contributions of additional datasets
  • FinOps X 2026 (San Diego, June 8–11) will feature a dedicated FOCUS Lab for hands-on work

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