Glossary

Lane

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.

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

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.

p95

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

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

The nightly collection job, 02:30 to 06:15 UTC, fanning out across every connected subscription. Stage times are in data sources.

Pipeline in these docs always means your own CI/CD, the thing your team merges an approved change through.

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, enriches them with utilisation evidence, and only then does a finding exist.

A candidate is a finding before an architect has sized it.

The app’s own decision page is titled Recommendations, because that is what the screen says. Validated fixes shows it.

Access terms

Term	What it means
Your estate	The Azure subscriptions and resources Infralign reads. Your tenant is the Entra directory they sit in.
The app	The customer-facing UI at app.infralign.ai: dashboards, reports, chatbot, findings, and the admin pages.
Path	A connection method: the default path, or the legacy classic setup. A lane is a data source, not a connection method.
The default path	One Infralign enterprise application, consented to once by your tenant admin, is both the sign-in identity and the identity the nightly run reads your estate as. You create no app, hold no secret, and track no expiry.
Classic setup	Legacy, not offered to new customers. You register an application in your own tenant, create a client secret for it, and paste four values into the wizard, so the data access runs as an identity you hold.
Service principal	The identity Infralign authenticates as in your tenant. On the default path it is the Infralign enterprise application, which appears when your admin grants consent.
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

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.