Getting started
Your first day
What happens in the 24 hours after you connect Azure, and what to look at first.
Once the service principal is in place and the roles are assigned, everything else happens on Infralign’s side. Your dashboards populate after the first nightly pipeline run, within 24 hours. The free visibility tier then comes online: four persona dashboards per cost lane, monthly FinOps audit reports, and a chatbot over your own Azure spend.
The first nightly run
Section titled “The first nightly run”After you connect Azure, the next nightly run reads your data through the read-only service principal and builds your warehouse. Each run moves through the same stages:
| Time (CET) | Stage | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 02:30 | Acquire | The platform pulls from the Azure Cost Details API (the default daily lane), Azure Resource Graph, Azure Advisor, Azure Monitor metrics, the Activity Log, and Azure Retail Prices. On very large estates an optional FOCUS export lane can be added. |
| 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 boards read. |
| 05:45 | Sync | The dashboards refresh against the new data. |
| 06:15 | Ready | A pipeline summary card lands in your Teams channel if you have connected it. |
Your dashboards open with trend rather than a single day, because the first run backfills your cost history.
What to look at first
Section titled “What to look at first”- The Executive board. Check the latest complete month spend against your Azure invoice. Compare the Billed figure, not the headline effective (amortised) one, and expect small gaps from amortisation, credits, tax, and marketplace charges — see reconciling to your Azure invoice. If a subscription total is missing, it probably needs a Reader assignment.
- The Engineering board. Idle VMs, rightsizing candidates, and commitment coverage are where the audit will concentrate. Knowing which numbers surprise you makes the audit session faster.
- The chatbot. Ask something you would normally dig for — “what did SQL cost last month?” or “which subscription grew fastest this quarter?” See the chatbot for its scope.
What happens next
Section titled “What happens next”The visibility tier is yours to keep using. The next step is the audit, whose findings each carry the same six decision fields — see reading your audit report. The typical timeline from here:
- Week 1 — dashboards reconciled; candidate findings generated automatically, then sized and prioritised by the architect; the working session reviews them and the finalised report follows.
- Week 2 — change plans for the highest-impact findings reviewed with your team (expert-led engagement).
- Week 3–4 — approved changes merged and savings verified against the same billing data your dashboards read.
Read what the audit covers before booking the session.
Next: How your data flows — the annotated read-only path from your estate to your dashboards.