lab-09.md

permalink	/labs/lab-09
title	Lab 09 - FinOps Agents and Azure Cost Governance
description	Use FinOps agents to estimate infrastructure costs, enforce tag compliance, apply budget gates, and explore right-sizing recommendations for the sample app.

Overview

Duration	45 minutes
Level	Advanced (Optional)
Prerequisites	Lab 00, Lab 01, Lab 02

Important

This lab is optional and requires an Azure subscription with Cost Management Reader role assigned to your account. You can complete the exercises using Copilot Chat agent prompts without deploying resources, but an Azure subscription provides richer context for cost analysis.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this lab, you will be able to:

• Run the cost-analysis-agent to estimate infrastructure deployment costs from Bicep templates
• Use the finops-governance-agent to check tag compliance against organizational policies
• Use the deployment-cost-gate-agent to enforce budget thresholds before deployment
• Understand right-sizing recommendations and their cost impact

Exercises

Exercise 9.1: Cost Analysis

Use the Cost Analysis Agent to estimate monthly costs for the sample app infrastructure.

1. Open the Copilot Chat panel (Ctrl+Shift+I).

2. Type the following prompt:

   @cost-analysis-agent Analyze sample-app/infra/main.bicep for estimated monthly costs
   

3. Wait for the agent to complete its analysis. Review the cost breakdown. The agent should identify these high-cost resources:

   Resource	SKU	Estimated Monthly Cost
   App Service Plan	P1v3 (3 instances)	~$420
   SQL Database	GP_Gen5_8 (8 vCores)	~$800
   Storage Account	Standard_GRS	~$50
   Total		~$1,270

4. Note that the sample app uses premium-tier SKUs that far exceed what a sample application requires. This is intentional to demonstrate cost governance capabilities.

Exercise 9.2: Tag Governance

Check whether the infrastructure template follows organizational tagging policies.

1. In Copilot Chat, type:

   @finops-governance-agent Check sample-app/infra/main.bicep for tag compliance
   

2. Review the findings. The agent should identify missing tags that organizations typically require:

   Missing Tag	Purpose
   costCenter	Maps resources to a billing cost center
   environment	Identifies the deployment stage (dev, staging, production)
   owner	Designates the responsible team or individual

3. Consider why tag compliance matters: without proper tags, organizations cannot accurately allocate cloud costs to teams, track spending by environment, or enforce accountability.

Exercise 9.3: Cost Gate

Apply a budget threshold to determine whether the deployment should proceed.

1. In Copilot Chat, type:

   @deployment-cost-gate-agent Evaluate sample-app/infra/ against a $100/month budget
   

2. Review the cost gate result. The agent should report that the estimated monthly cost (~$1,270) exceeds the $100/month budget by approximately $1,170.

3. In a real CI/CD pipeline, this cost gate would block the deployment and require either budget approval or infrastructure changes before proceeding.

4. Consider how cost gates prevent unexpected cloud spending: teams set a budget threshold, and the gate rejects deployments that would exceed it.

Exercise 9.4: Right-Sizing (Optional)

Reduce costs by switching to appropriately sized SKUs and verify the impact.

1. Open sample-app/infra/variables.bicep in the editor.

2. Locate the appServiceSkuName parameter and change the default value from P1v3 to B1.

3. Locate the sqlDatabaseSkuName parameter and change the default value from GP_Gen5_8 to Basic.

4. Save the file.

5. Re-run the cost analysis agent:

   @cost-analysis-agent Analyze sample-app/infra/main.bicep for estimated monthly costs
   

6. Compare the new estimate against the original. The right-sized deployment should cost approximately $30/month, a reduction of over 97%.

7. Revert your changes to variables.bicep after completing this exercise so the intentional issues remain for other labs. Use Ctrl+Z or run git checkout sample-app/infra/variables.bicep.

Verification Checkpoint

Before proceeding, verify:

• The cost-analysis-agent estimated monthly costs for the sample app infrastructure
• The finops-governance-agent identified at least 3 missing tags
• The deployment-cost-gate-agent flagged the budget breach against a $100/month threshold
• You identified at least 3 optimization opportunities across all exercises

Next Steps

Proceed to Lab 10 — Agent Remediation Workflows.