[Power BI] Resource Counts - New metric for reporting?

📝 Scenario

I look after cloud optimisation for our business and report monthly to exec. This includes general cost information, but also new resources deployed, resources decommissioned and any future potential charges upcoming.

Even though we make a lot of savings, we generally stay quite static month-to-month for costs. This is due to constant deployments fighting against optimisation and saving strategies.

Some months I can tell the business I removed $30k pa in future charges by cleaning up backups and storage accounts, but the monthly invoice amount won't usually reflect that. The written report can become cumbersome for the reader if I have to constantly explain growth in other areas offset those changes.

There appears to be no way to get any historical resource counts directly from Azure, but it is very easy to get a resource count at the current time with the resource graph explorer;

Resources
| summarize count()

💎 Solution

Cost exports do contain historical data (my exports go back almost 2 years) and could be a great source. I don't think there is anything else available for this unless you had a log analytics workspace already ingesting the information required.

Any metric that can count resources or count usage emitting meters would be great. This can be tracked over time and may provide further insight into cost movement.
I'm presuming the PowerBI CostSummary report would be a good destination for this metric.

These counts by would be very useful to track over the tenant, but also counts per subscription, service etc would provide insight into different areas of the business.

ℹ️ Additional context

Using PowerBI you can to a count(distinct) on a resource column. Some examples of this count below. I think this is number of resources that emitted usage data during the timeframe specified. It's difficult to explain to an exec anyway.

Some examples of this count by date range;

JAN 1-1: 2014
JAN 1-31: 4232
FEB 1-1: 2136
DEC 1-1: 2010
NOV 1-1: 1864

Note: My actual resource count today is 6500+. Never under 6000 from memory.

🙋‍♀️ Ask for the community

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If anybody knows of another count method that would be great. At the moment I can only think of using logic apps to query a resource count, and then append to csv, or send the count somewhere to manually input into reports.

Start by reviewing the Power BI CostSummary report and the historical cost exports described in the issue. Clarify which resource or usage counts should be measured, their time range and grouping, and how the resulting metric should appear in the report; done requires an agreed metric and reporting design.