FinOps and FOCUS Billing

Who this is for: FinOps practitioners, cloud finance teams, platform engineers, and any finance team who wants to export IONOS CLOUD cost data to third-party tools (Apptio, CloudHealth, Finout, custom dashboards) or build cost attribution reports without provider-specific transformations.

Note: If you want to check invoices, compare months, or review usage, see Query Billing and Cost Data first; it requires no knowledge of FOCUS. This page is for teams building standards-compliant cost pipelines or integrating with FinOps tools.

The MCP server ships a FOCUS v1.3 (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) column mapping as an MCP resource. The billing tools themselves return native IONOS API fields; the mapping is what your AI assistant (or pipeline) applies to produce a FOCUS-compliant dataset. FOCUS is the open standard that the FinOps Foundation publishes for cloud billing data interoperability.

Why FOCUS?

Every cloud provider uses different field names for the same billing concepts. Moving from one FinOps tool to another, or adding a second cloud provider, means rewriting your cost models and reports from scratch. FOCUS eliminates this: once your data conforms to the standard schema, it works with any compliant tool without changes.

In practice: IONOS billing data mapped to FOCUS can be loaded directly into Apptio Cloudability, CloudHealth, Finout, or a custom dashboard alongside AWS and Azure data, using the same column names, the same filters, and the same rollup logic.

What is FOCUS?

FOCUS defines a common schema for cloud cost and usage data, standardising field names, data types, and charge categories across providers. Any FinOps tool (Apptio, CloudHealth, Finout, custom pipelines) can consume a FOCUS-compliant dataset without provider-specific transformations.

FOCUS v1.3 support in IONOS CLOUD

The MCP server exposes the full FOCUS v1.3 column mapping as a readable resource:

ionos://billing/focus-v1.3

Ask your AI assistant to read this resource before building FOCUS-compliant pipelines:

Read the resource ionos://billing/focus-v1.3 and show me the full column mapping for the IONOS billing tools.

Supported FOCUS column families

Column family	Supported fields
Account	BillingAccountId, BillingAccountName, SubAccountId, SubAccountName
Billing & Cost	BilledCost, BillingCurrency, EffectiveCost, ConsumedQuantity, ConsumedUnit
Charge	ChargeCategory, ChargeClass, ChargeDescription, ChargeFrequency, ChargePeriodStart, ChargePeriodEnd
Resource	ResourceId, ResourceName, ResourceType
Service	ServiceCategory, ServiceName, ServiceSubcategory
Location	RegionId, RegionName, AvailabilityZone
Pricing	PricingCategory, PricingQuantity, PricingUnit

Tool → FOCUS mapping

Tool	ChargeCategory	Key FOCUS fields
list_billing_invoices	Usage, Tax, Credit, or Adjustment per line type	BilledCost, BillingCurrency, ChargePeriodStart/End
list_billing_usage / get_billing_usage_by_datacenter	Usage	ConsumedQuantity, ConsumedUnit (CPU-hours, GB-hours), ResourceId
list_billing_utilization (all variants)	Usage	ConsumedQuantity, ConsumedUnit, ResourceId
list_billing_traffic (all variants)	Usage	ConsumedQuantity (bytes in/out), ConsumedUnit (Byte)
list_billing_evn (all variants)	Usage	ChargePeriodStart/End, ResourceId
list_billing_products	—	SkuId, ListUnitPrice, PricingUnit reference
get_billing_profile	—	BillingAccountId (contract ID), SubAccountId (customer ID)

Example queries

Building a FOCUS-compliant cost dataset

Read the resource ionos://billing/focus-v1.3. Then retrieve my billing usage for the current month and map each record to the corresponding FOCUS v1.3 fields. Present the result as a table with FOCUS column names.

Using the FOCUS v1.3 mapping from ionos://billing/focus-v1.3, get my billing usage for the last three months grouped by data center and format it as a FOCUS-compliant dataset with BilledCost, ConsumedQuantity, ConsumedUnit, ResourceId, and ChargePeriodStart/End.

Cost attribution

Get the billing usage for all data centers this month. Group by RegionId and ServiceCategory (using the FOCUS mapping) to produce a cost attribution breakdown by location and service type.

List all EVN provisioning intervals for the current billing period. Map to FOCUS fields and group by ResourceType to show which resource types are driving the most charge intervals.

Invoice reconciliation

List my last three invoices and map each line item to its FOCUS ChargeCategory (Usage, Tax, Credit, or Adjustment). Show the total BilledCost per category for each invoice and highlight any changes month over month.

Pricing catalog lookups

List the IONOS CLOUD product pricing catalog. For each product, show the SkuId, ListUnitPrice, and PricingUnit in FOCUS format. Filter to Compute Engine products only.

Combining documentation and live data

Add the IONOS CLOUD Documentation MCP alongside the infrastructure server to answer questions that span both:

Look up the FOCUS v1.3 specification in the IONOS CLOUD docs, then pull my actual billing usage for this month and map each record to the FOCUS column names the docs describe.

Read the IONOS CLOUD billing documentation and check whether my current token has sufficient permissions to access all billing tools. Then pull my invoices for the last three months.

FinOps pipeline validation

Read the resource ionos://billing/focus-v1.3 and check my current billing usage data against the FOCUS v1.3 schema. Identify any fields that are null where the FOCUS spec marks them as mandatory (M) or conditional (C), and flag the records that would fail a FOCUS compliance check.

Integration with FinOps tooling

The MCP server returns raw IONOS API field names. To produce FOCUS-compliant output for external FinOps tools:

1. Ask the AI assistant to read ionos://billing/focus-v1.3 to load the column mapping.
2. Request billing data using the relevant tools.
3. Ask the assistant to transform the output using the mapping and export it in a format your FinOps tool accepts (CSV, JSON, etc.).

For automated pipelines, combine the MCP server with a file-write tool or drive it headlessly from any MCP client SDK (for example, the Python or TypeScript MCP SDKs) to orchestrate the retrieval and transformation programmatically.

Next steps

• Security Audit with AI: use billing anomaly detection as part of a broader security audit
• Tool Reference: Billing: full list of billing tools and their inputs
• Query Billing and Cost Data: simpler billing queries without FOCUS formatting