Dashboards

Dashboards are part of the visibility tier. They run on a dedicated Apache Superset instance embedded in the app, so you install nothing and need no separate BI login.

Once your first nightly run has landed, your dashboards open within one business day. See your first day.

Click any image to enlarge.

The four persona dashboards

Each cost lane carries four dashboards, one per audience.

Dashboard	Use it to
Executive — Cost & Savings	Reconcile billed spend, track budget position, and identify the largest movements.
FinOps — Commitments & Savings	Compare commitment coverage with target and review realised savings before buying more.
Engineering — Efficiency & Resources	Review idle VMs, rightsizing candidates, licensing opportunities, anomalies, and resource-level spend.
Data Ops — Quality & Freshness	Check when each source landed and investigate data-quality flags.

All four share the layout below: a one-line read of the month, a row of KPI tiles, then the charts behind them.

NovaPulse is a real Azure estate with its identifiers replaced, and these figures are unedited. Captured 4 August 2026, three days into the month, which is why the two projection tiles extrapolate so far above the completed one.

Reading the freshness banner

Every dashboard carries an as-of line. Cost, utilisation, and inventory have separate dates because their sources land at different times.

Read the date beside a figure before using it.

Lane or state	Expected freshness	Action
Cost API	About one day behind	Investigate when the date is more than two days behind.
FOCUS	Up to one month behind	No action; the lane runs monthly.
STALE	Outside the source’s expected window	Check the source on the Data Ops dashboard.

The Data Ops dashboard is where that last row is answered. Its source-freshness table gives one row per feed, with the date that feed has data through and how far behind it is.

Same estate, same capture date.

Cost terms

Quoting the wrong term is the commonest reconciliation error. Cost terms in the glossary defines each one.

• Quote billed (actual) cost when reconciling against the Azure invoice.
• Quote effective (amortised) cost, the dashboard default, when steering decisions.
• Quote coverage % per commitment pool only. Savings Plans and Reservations use different denominators, so never average them.

Savings tiles

Realised savings and indicative savings both appear on the dashboards, and they are measured against different baselines.

Tile	What it measures	Baseline
Realised commitment savings	What your reservations and savings plans have already saved, banked.	Pay-as-you-go
Indicative savings	The saving a finding would deliver if approved.	Retail (pay-as-you-go) price

Do not add the two values. Their different baselines make the total double-count savings.

Some tiles ignore the date filter because they describe a fixed period or current state:

• projected versus budget
• realised and indicative savings
• coverage
• cost by country

The cost lanes

Lane	Cadence	Use it for
Cost API	Daily	The freshest movements and the default four dashboards.
FOCUS 1.2	Monthly	A standardised, portable dataset for estates that outgrow the nightly window.

The Cost API lane merges Actual and Amortized metrics. When you need FOCUS, follow FOCUS exports and storage setup.

Refresh and filters

The nightly run syncs the dashboards before the working day. You do not need to refresh them manually.

See data sources for stage times and the 13-month backfill.

Filter	Available scope
Subscription	One subscription or the whole estate
Service	Azure service or service category
Region	Country or region
Charge period	Month or date range

Exporting numbers

Download a tile’s CSV from the BI view. During an engagement, request monthly report figures as a spreadsheet.

A self-serve export API is on the roadmap and is not available today.

No estate changes

Every dashboard is built from read-only access to billing and resource metadata. Infralign never modifies tags, resources, or exports to improve its own reporting.