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.

Opening the dashboards is a separate step, done by a person rather than a timer. Infralign checks that first run, and once the run has landed your dashboards open within one business day. A person at support@infralign.ai emails you when they are live. Nothing automated sends that message, and the progress screen updates when they open.

The free visibility tier includes four persona dashboards per lane, monthly FinOps audit reports, and a chatbot over your Azure spend.

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	The platform 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. Your dashboards are not open yet, because opening them is the separate step above. Infralign checks that run, and once it has landed they 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

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, captured 4 August 2026. 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.

4. Open the Engineering dashboard.

5. Review idle VMs, rightsizing candidates, and commitment coverage.

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

6. Open the chatbot.

7. 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 infralign-reader 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 visibility tier remains available. The audit then follows this typical timeline:

Time	Outcome
Week 1	An architect sizes candidate findings, leads the working session, and finalises the report.
Week 2	Your team reviews change plans for the highest-impact findings.
Weeks 3–4	Your team merges approved changes, and Infralign verifies savings against billing data.

Read what the audit covers before booking. See reading your audit report for the six decision fields.

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Next: How your data flows. Trace the read-only path from your estate to your dashboards.