What the course is
The FinOps Certified FOCUS Analyst credential teaches the FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification (FOCUS™) in depth. The goal is to enable you to apply FOCUS datasets to real business problems — making cost and usage data more accessible across the organisation, building shared vocabulary between Finance and Engineering, and articulating the value of cloud and related technology spend with confidence.
By completing the course, you should be qualified to use a FOCUS dataset alongside the FOCUS Use Case Library to handle both standard and custom analysis scenarios.
Course outcomes
- Build a common language between Finance and Technology teams.
- Make billing data more accessible across the organisation.
- Use that data confidently and correctly — with the right cost column for the question.
- Leverage the FOCUS Use Case Library and run its queries against your own datasets.
- Apply best practices to filter, aggregate, and validate query results.
Primary sources to bookmark
This course is written from the open FOCUS specification and its public supporting content. When the course says something definitive, the spec is always the canonical reference — bookmark these and read them alongside each lesson.
| Resource | Purpose |
|---|---|
| FOCUS Specification | The full open technical specification, all current and past versions. The canonical reference for every conformance question. |
| FOCUS Spec — Supporting Content (GitHub) | Open-source explanatory material that sits alongside the spec: reasoning behind the rules, worked examples, clarifications. Where this course explains why a rule exists, this is the source. |
| FOCUS Spec repository (GitHub) | The full source repo for the spec — issues, working drafts, history of every change. Useful when you want to know how the current text got that way. |
| FOCUS Column Library | Reference for column headers across spec versions — descriptions, IDs, display names, and version introduced. |
| Use Cases & Queries | Browsable use cases filterable by FinOps Capability and spec version, with associated columns and SQL. |
| FOCUS Sandbox | Run queries against anonymised real billing data. |
| Adopting FOCUS Paper | Stages of FOCUS adoption, decisions to make, concrete steps. |
How to use this course
Eight lessons, roughly four hours of reading. The early lessons (1–4) are conceptual; the middle (5–6) is reference-heavy and best read with the spec open in another tab; the late lessons (7–8) are practical and packed with field examples.
At the end you’ll find a 50-question practice test in the same format as the official certification exam. It’s self-graded with rationale on every answer and you can take it as many times as you like. Enter your email to start the test — we’ll mail you a copy of your results.
This is a study aid, not the official credential. The real FinOps Foundation course is where you go to actually take the certification exam. Use this course to learn the material and pressure-test what you know.