Understand your Azure bill for a Fabric capacity

A Microsoft Fabric capacity is an Azure resource, so your Azure bill in the Microsoft Cost Management experience in the Azure portal shows its usage charges. Your bill splits these charges across many separate meters, which makes it hard to tell how each meter maps to the Fabric usage in your organization.

This article explains the meters that make up your Fabric capacity charges and shows how to reconcile your Azure bill with the usage that the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics app reports.

Invoice meters

In Microsoft Cost Management, your cost analysis and invoice show multiple meters related to your Fabric capacity resource. Most consumption meters follow a common naming pattern: a workload or feature name followed by a usage suffix. Each meter represents the compute (CU) that a workload consumes.

The exact set of meters changes as Fabric adds features, and some meters are in preview. The following list is representative; to retrieve the current, complete list, see Get the current list of meters.

Most consumption meter names end with the suffix Capacity Usage CU, which indicates the compute charged against your provisioned Fabric capacity. The OneLake transaction meters add further suffixes for the storage tier (Hot, Cool, or Cold), the access path (via API), and business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR).

To identify a specific line on your bill, find its meter group in the following alphabetical list, then review the workload that generated it and what it covers. Meter groups are shown by their base name, without the Capacity Usage CU suffix or the OneLake tier and access-path variants. The list is representative of the meter groups available when this article was last updated. For the authoritative current list, see Get the current list of meters.

The total usage from all consumption meters adds up to the cost of the provisioned Fabric capacity. Your bill might also show meters with generic names such as Fabric Meter 24, which represent features that aren't yet publicly named.

Get the current list of meters

The Microsoft Fabric pricing page lists capacity SKU prices and per-GB storage rates, but it doesn't enumerate the individual consumption meters. To get the current, complete list of meters, call the Azure Retail Prices API and filter on the service name Microsoft Fabric. The API returns every Fabric meter with its pricing, region, and unit of measure.

Storage meters

Fabric also charges for data stored in OneLake and in the databases hosted on your capacity. These meters are measured in GB per month rather than in capacity units, so they appear separately from the consumption meters.

If you buy reserved capacity, the reservation appears under a separate Fabric Capacity meter rather than the consumption meters.

Compare your Azure bill with your usage

Use the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics app to correlate your Azure bill with your organization's Fabric usage analytics.

The default view in the app shows trends in consumption by workload over the past 14 days.

The items table aggregates usage by workspace, workload type, and item name. It measures the billable usage that each item generates in capacity units (CUs).

To compare the information in the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics app to what Azure shows, filter your cost management view in the Azure portal so that it shows the same time period as the app. Review the cost under the meter for the item you're reviewing. For example, for a warehouse, it's the Data Warehouse Capacity Usage CU meter. The price per CU hour for your capacity depends on your capacity's region. View the Fabric prices per region on the Microsoft Fabric pricing page.

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