Your first day

Status

Live · Last verified 27 July 2026

What you’ll need

• Prerequisite: the setup wizard finished, from connect Azure
• Time: around 15 minutes, once the first nightly run has landed

Once you confirm the connection, a progress screen names the ingestion window and the day your first cost data is expected.

The run is a timer. Opening the dashboards is a person. Infralign checks that first run, and once it has landed your dashboards open within one business day. A person at [email protected] emails you when they are live.

The dashboards, reports and chatbot come with the service. Price and terms has the rest.

Infralign collects cost for the subscriptions you scoped and no others. A subscription created later is never added on its own. An admin adds it on the connection page. See adding a subscription later.

The first nightly run

The next nightly run reads through the service principal and builds your warehouse:

Time (UTC)	Stage	What happens
02:30	Acquire	Infralign reads cost, inventory, Advisor, Monitor, Activity Log, and retail price data.
03:45	Derive	Raw data is shaped through the first warehouse layers (bronze → silver).
04:45	Build	The shaped data is built into the gold layer and the marts the dashboards read.
05:45	Sync	The dashboards refresh against the new data.
06:15	Ready	The night’s data is in place and the dashboards are serving it.

The timers run on UTC. Read the table against your own clock: at Irish or UK summer time the window is 03:30 to 07:15, and in central Europe it is 04:30 to 08:15.

That last row is the steady state, from your second run onwards. On the first run it means only that the data has landed, and your dashboards then open within one business day.

The first run backfills cost history, so the dashboards open with a trend already in them.

Estates whose daily Cost Details export outgrows the nightly window can add the optional FOCUS export lane.

Tip

Finish the wizard at any time of day. The progress screen works out which nightly run is yours. A wizard finished at 03:10, after that night’s run has started, names the following night.

What to look at first

Check the billed total

1. Open the Executive dashboard.
2. Select the latest complete month.
3. Compare Billed cost with your Azure invoice.

Done when the dashboard shows a billed total for every connected subscription.

The Executive dashboard on the NovaPulse demo estate. Yours opens with your own figures and a cost trend already backfilled.

Caution

Compare the invoice with Billed cost, not with effective (amortised) cost. Credits, tax, marketplace charges, and amortisation can create small differences. See invoice reconciliation.

Check the engineering signals

1. Open the Engineering dashboard.
2. Review idle VMs, rightsizing candidates, and commitment coverage.

Done when you have noted any unexpected candidate or coverage value.

Check the chatbot

1. Open the chatbot.
2. Ask a cost question, such as “What did SQL cost last month?”

Done when the response names the expected subscription, service, or period.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause	Fix
A subscription has no billed total	Cost Management Reader is missing on that subscription	Assign the role. Wait for the next nightly run.
Cost appears but inventory or CPU is empty	Reader is missing on that subscription	Assign the role, then select Re-check the connection on the connection page.
A subscription you expected is not on any dashboard	It was excluded at the Scope step, it was created after setup, or the application Infralign reads as has no Reader role on it	Tick it on the connection page and save. If it is not listed, select Re-check the connection to run discovery again, then tick it. If it still does not appear, assign the two roles and re-check.
A dashboard shows STALE	A source missed its expected landing time	Check the Data Ops dashboard for the affected source.

What happens next

The 7 days of the Decision Pack start once read-only access is in place. A typical timeline:

Time	Outcome
Within the 7 days	An architect sizes candidate findings and holds one 45-minute call with your engineer. Engineering sees the findings 2 working days before finance.
Day 7	You receive the Pack: 3 to 5 ranked decisions, and what to leave alone.
After the Pack	Only if you continue: the Monthly Close. Your team or your MSP makes each change, and every saving is re-checked on the bill.

Read what the Decision Pack covers before the call. See reading your Decision Pack for the six decision fields.

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Next: How your data flows.