Power BI Azure Cost Management Connector Returns No Data Under CSP — Why, and What to Do

Why did the connector stop working?

The Cost Management connector authenticates against a billing account — an EA enrollment number or an MCA billing profile. Under CSP, that billing account lives in your partner's tenant, under a Microsoft Partner Agreement (MPA), and Microsoft's connector documentation is explicit about the supported set: "The Microsoft Cost Management connector currently supports customers with: A direct Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA); An Enterprise Agreement (EA)." The same page adds that indirect MCAs, pay-as-you-go MCAs, and "Microsoft Partner Agreements also aren't supported."

Microsoft's own transfer documentation puts it even more plainly: "After you transfer a subscription from one of the agreements to a Microsoft Partner Agreement, your Power BI reports stop working." There is no documented error message for this condition — the typical symptom is a connector that authenticates but returns no rows, or a scope that can no longer be found. Re-entering credentials, changing the enrollment number, or reinstalling the connector won't help, because the billing scope it needs no longer exists in your tenant.

What are your options?

1. Ask your CSP partner for their reporting or exports (free, partner-dependent)

Your partner has billing-scope access on their side and may offer a cost portal or scheduled exports. This can be a reasonable stopgap, but partner data usually arrives in the partner's own schema — often invoice-level rather than daily resource-level detail — so your existing report model won't bind to it, and refresh cadence and column layout are outside your control.

2. Per-subscription exports plus a rebuilt Power BI model (free tooling, real rebuild)

Microsoft's documented workaround for unsupported agreements is Exports: "you can use Exports to save the cost data to a share and then connect to it using Power BI." Under CSP this means configuring an export per subscription (management group exports aren't supported for CSP), landing the files in a storage account, and rebuilding your Power BI model against the export schema. It works, and it's the right call if you want full pipeline ownership — but plan for the model rebuild, per-subscription export administration, and stitching files at refresh time.

3. The FinOps hubs / Fabric path (free toolkit, infrastructure and setup costs)

The FinOps toolkit supports CSP — with the documented caveat that "CSP customers need to configure exports for each subscription in order to ingest their total cost into FinOps hubs." You then operate the hub storage and ingestion, optionally with Data Explorer or Fabric on top, and track the toolkit's monthly releases. Solid choice for teams with FinOps engineering capacity; see our side-by-side comparison for an honest breakdown.

4. A maintained drop-in data source

CSP Continuity collects cost data from every subscription daily inside your tenant and gives Power BI three connection paths from a single deployment:

• SQL DirectQuery to the CostManagement_Usage view using the read-only PowerBIReader account. Column names match EA and MCA exports — CostInBillingCurrency, PreTaxCost, UsageDate, SubscriptionGuid, InstanceId — so existing DAX measures are designed to bind without changes.
• Parquet import from Azure Blob Storage, partitioned by year/month/subscription, for import mode or Microsoft Fabric.
• REST API via Power BI's Web connector — same request and response format as Microsoft's Cost Management Query API.

Deployment is about 5 minutes from the Azure Marketplace plus a 2-minute PowerShell script for read-only permissions; up to 13 months of history is typically available within hours. All data stays in your tenant.