Azure Cost Management API: Scope Not Supported Under CSP — Querying Across Subscriptions

Which scopes actually work under CSP?

Microsoft's Cost Management scopes documentation draws the map. Billing scopes — billing account, department, enrollment account, billing profile — exist under the partner's Microsoft Partner Agreement, in the partner's tenant. Management group scope is explicitly unsupported: "Cost Management doesn't support Management groups in CSP scopes," and the Cost Details API "doesn't support management groups for either EA or MCA customers" — so there's no agreement type where the API aggregates a management group for you. What's left for a CSP customer is the Azure RBAC scopes: subscription and resource group, one at a time.

If your tooling calls billing-account or department scope URLs from your EA/MCA days, those calls now fail with authorization errors — not because your service principal lost a role, but because the scope itself is no longer in your tenant.

How do you query across subscriptions anyway?

Option 1: loop the subscriptions yourself (free, plumbing included)

The per-subscription pattern is straightforward to start:

# The DIY pattern: query every subscription, merge client-side
subs=$(az account subscription list --query "[].subscriptionId" -o tsv)
for sub in $subs; do
  az rest --method post \
    --url "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/$sub/providers/Microsoft.CostManagement/query?api-version=2023-11-01" \
    --body '{
      "type": "ActualCost",
      "timeframe": "MonthToDate",
      "dataset": {
        "granularity": "Daily",
        "aggregation": { "totalCost": { "name": "Cost", "function": "Sum" } }
      }
    }' >> merged-results.jsonl
done
# ...then handle paging (nextLink), 429 backoff, schema merge, and storage yourself

For a one-off answer, this is fine — run it, merge in a spreadsheet or a script, done. As a standing pipeline it grows the usual appendages: paging via nextLink, 429 backoff with Retry-After, schema normalization across API versions, a database or storage layer, scheduling, monitoring, and handling subscriptions that appear and disappear. Reservation amortization also stays invisible at these scopes — rebuilding it is a separate project.

Option 2: point your tooling at a consolidated, compatible endpoint

CSP Continuity runs that loop for you daily, stores results in a SQL database in your tenant, and exposes a single query endpoint that speaks Microsoft's dialect:

// Before — Microsoft Cost Management API (per subscription only under CSP)
POST https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/{subId}/
     providers/Microsoft.CostManagement/query

// After — CSP Continuity (consolidated across all subscriptions)
POST https://<your-app>.azurewebsites.net/
     api/costmanagement/query

The request body format is Microsoft's, and responses come back in Microsoft's exact {id, name, type, properties: {columns, rows}} shape — so existing scripts, dashboards, and integrations built against the Cost Management Query API are designed to work with a URL change. Because queries hit a local database rather than the per-subscription service, results span all subscriptions at once and grouping isn't limited to Microsoft's two dimensions.