Reference
Glossary
The words the rest of these docs assume you already have. Lane, p95, amortised, gold, and the difference between a finding and a recommendation.
A lane is one ingestion path: a single source, a single cadence, and the dashboards built on top of it. Two exist.
| Lane | Source | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Cost API lane | Azure Cost Details API | Daily, on the nightly run |
| FOCUS lane | A FOCUS 1.2 export you own, pulled from your storage container | Monthly |
Every estate gets the Cost API lane. The FOCUS lane is optional; FOCUS exports and storage setup gives the two conditions that justify it.
“Four dashboards per lane” means each lane carries its own executive, FinOps, engineering and data-ops dashboards. The two lanes hold different data at different freshness, so mixing them on one dashboard would put a figure a day old beside one a month old with nothing on screen to tell them apart.
You will also see ingestion lane, which is the same word used for the pulling half of a lane rather than the reporting half.
Cost terms
Section titled “Cost terms”| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Billed (actual) cost | What Azure charges for usage in the period. This is the number on your invoice, and the only one that reconciles against it. |
| Effective (amortised) cost | Commitment purchases spread across the resources that consume them, instead of landing whole on the purchase date. Dashboards default to this because it is the fairer basis for a steering decision. |
| Like-for-like month comparison | Two months compared over an equal day count, with provisional days excluded. Any comparison against an incomplete current month uses it. |
| Coverage % | The committed share of eligible usage. Savings Plans measure it on a € basis, Reservations on an hours basis, so the two never average into a single number. |
| Recoverable (avoidable) spend | Idle-VM cost, half of each resize delta, and the Azure Hybrid Benefit estimate. Burstable B-series VMs are left out: low average CPU is what that SKU is for. |
The dashboards use these five precisely, and quoting the wrong one is the commonest reconciliation error. Reconciling to your Azure invoice works through a case.
Savings terms
Section titled “Savings terms”| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Indicative opportunity | What a finding would save if implemented, under stated assumptions. Modelled. Never booked. |
| Verified saving | An observed reduction after an approved change went live, attributable within the agreed method. |
| Directional | The cost moved the way the change predicted, but attribution or the observation window is incomplete. |
| Not verified | The expected reduction did not appear, or other changes make the result unreadable. |
Savings measurement methodology sets out how a result earns each label.
The value 95% of samples in the window fall below. Infralign reads 30-day p95 CPU from Azure Monitor.
A mean would be easier to compute and worse to decide on. A VM that idles all night and saturates for two hours every afternoon has a low mean, and resizing it on that mean removes exactly the headroom it exists for. p95 keeps the afternoon in the number and discards the one-off spike.
An idle day is a day whose utilisation never rises above the idle threshold. Idle days are counted alongside p95, because five idle days out of thirty is a different finding from thirty out of thirty.
Bronze, silver, gold
Section titled “Bronze, silver, gold”The three layers of the warehouse, in the order the nightly run builds them.
- Bronze holds what was pulled, as it arrived from the source.
- Silver holds the same data conformed: typed, deduplicated, and reconciled across sources.
- Gold holds the query-ready tables. Dashboards read gold. The chatbot is allowlisted to gold and nothing else, which is why a chatbot answer and a dashboard tile agree.
The nightly run
Section titled “The nightly run”The ingestion job, 02:30 to 06:15 UTC, fanning out across every connected subscription. Stage times are in data sources.
It is deliberately never called a pipeline in these docs. Pipeline means your own CI/CD, the thing your team merges an approved change through, and one word cannot carry both without a reader eventually mistaking which side of the boundary a sentence is on.
Finding, and recommendation
Section titled “Finding, and recommendation”A finding is anything Infralign puts in front of you for a decision. It carries six fields, it has an owner, and you approve or reject it.
A recommendation is Azure Advisor’s own product term. Advisor emits recommendations; Infralign treats them as one input signal among several, enriches them with utilisation evidence, and only then does a finding exist. The docs keep the two words apart on purpose, so that a sentence about Advisor’s output cannot be read as a sentence about ours.
The app’s own decision page is titled Recommendations, because that is what the screen says. Validated fixes shows it.
Access terms
Section titled “Access terms”| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Service principal | The identity Infralign authenticates as, created in your own tenant and named infralign-reader by convention. You own it, and you can delete it. |
| Management group scope | A role granted once on the management group covering your estate, inherited by every subscription under it. The alternative is one grant per subscription. Permissions compares them. |
| The three gates | Restricted access, expert validation, and your team’s approval. A change clears all three, in that order. See the safety model. |
| Blast radius | What breaks if a change misbehaves. Every finding states it before you are asked to approve anything. |
FOCUS 1.2
Section titled “FOCUS 1.2”The FinOps Foundation’s open billing standard, produced natively by Azure. Its value is portability: spend arrives in a shape that other tools already read, so moving it does not mean re-mapping it.