Finding your way around

A tour of the sidebar, top bar and page controls: what every page answers, plan gating, currency, language, links and caching.

Finding your way around

A walk through the sidebar group by group, then the top bar and the small controls that save you time: currency, language, links, refresh and CostGlass AI.

Where in CostGlassSidebar and top bar

PlanAll plans (some pages need Growth or Scale)

Time needed10 minutes

In short

The sidebar is organised by the job you are doing: Costs (understand), Allocation (ownership), Plan & Control (guardrails), Optimise (save), Operations (running services) and Settings (setup and admin).
Menu items with a padlock belong to a higher plan. Click one to see which plan unlocks it.
The top bar holds the Security button, the currency selector, the language selector and your user menu.
The address bar of Cost Explorer and Reports follows what you select, so you can copy it to share the exact view.
Heavy pages are cached in your browser for an hour. Use a page's Refresh button to force fresh data.

The layout at a glance

Sidebar (left). The groups are collapsible: click a group name to open or close it. The group that contains the page you are on opens by itself.
Top bar. Shows a breadcrumb and the page title, then Security, the currency selector, the language selector and your user menu.
Content. The page itself. Most pages start with a header that says what the page is for, then the controls, then the data.
Documentation. The book icon at the foot of the sidebar opens these docs.

The sidebar on the left, the top bar across the top and the Dashboard in the content area.

The sidebar, group by group

Dashboard

A single item at the top. Dashboard is your landing page: month-to-date spend, projected month-end, savings, resource count, tag compliance, a daily trend and your connected clouds. It also hosts your custom dashboards. See Dashboards.

Costs: understand where the money goes

Page	What it answers	Guide	Plan
Explorer	Slice spend by service, account, region or tag across every cloud, filter by cloud, and compare periods.	Guide	All plans
Reports	Ready-made and custom reports with two grouping dimensions, a library of saved reports and scheduled delivery. Export to Excel, CSV or PDF.	Guide	All plans
Kubernetes Costs	Cost of your clusters by namespace, workload, pod or label, plus carbon and cluster health.	Guide	Growth and above
SaaS & AI Spend	Spend with OpenAI, Anthropic, Datadog and Snowflake, and the connections for them.	Guide	All plans
Unit Economics	Cost per unit of business output, such as per customer or per thousand requests.	Guide	All plans

Allocation: who owns the spend

Page	What it answers	Guide	Plan
Tag Explorer	Spend grouped by a tag key such as team or environment, using what each cloud billed.	Guide	All plans
Tag Compliance	Which resources are missing the tags your policy requires.	Guide	All plans
Virtual Tagging	Assign spend to teams or products with rules, without changing anything in the cloud.	Guide	Growth and above

Plan & Control: guardrails

Page	What it answers	Guide	Plan
Forecasting	Where will this month and next month end up, and what if we add resources?	Guide	All plans
Budgets & Alerts: Budgets	Are we within the limits we set?	Guide	All plans
Anomalies	Which costs jumped unexpectedly, why, and who gets told?	Guide	All plans
Budgets & Alerts: Cost alerts	Rules that fire when spend rises period over period.	Guide	All plans
Alert Rules	The overall alert rules and alert history.	Guide	All plans
Issues	A shared list of cost problems with assignees, created from anomalies and budget alerts.	Guide	All plans

Optimise: reduce the bill

Page	What it answers	Guide	Plan
Savings	A prioritised list of actions that should cut spend, each with how its figure was reached.	Guide	All plans
Rightsizing	Which machines and databases are bigger or smaller than their measured use needs.	Guide	All plans
Commitments	Reserved Instance and Savings Plan coverage, utilisation and expiry.	Guide	Growth and above
Instance Scheduler	Switch non-production EC2 instances and Auto Scaling groups off outside working hours.	Guide	Growth and above

Operations: running services

Page	What it answers	Guide	Plan
Ops Overview	A cockpit with services online, discovered assets, open incidents and your support requests.	Guide	All plans
Cloud Resources	The inventory of everything CostGlass found in your clouds.	Guide	All plans
Uptime	Health checks on your public endpoints and who is alerted.	Guide	Growth and above
Incidents	Open production incidents recorded for your organisation.	Guide	Growth and above (server-side)
Support & Requests	Raise a request, bug report or question with CostGlass engineers and track it.	Guide	Growth and above (server-side)

Settings: setup and administration

The Settings group is at the bottom and has three sub-headings.

Heading	Page	What it is for	Guide
Connections	Cloud Accounts	Connect and manage clouds, vendors and Kubernetes clusters.	Guide
Connections	FOCUS 1.0	Your multi-cloud billing data in the FOCUS standard, exportable as CSV.
Connections	CUR Export	The AWS Cost and Usage Report connection that feeds AWS costs.	AWS guide
Organisation	Hierarchy	Draw your business units and teams and map accounts to them.	Guide
Organisation	Team	Invite people and manage roles.	Guide
Organisation	API Keys	Keys for scripts and AI assistants.	Guide
Organisation	Single sign-on	Sign in with your company identity provider (Scale and above).	Guide
Organisation	Data Residency	Your fixed region and data retention.	Guide
Organisation	Audit Log	Who changed what, for owners and admins.	Guide
Account & Billing	Notifications	Your spend summaries and where they are sent.	Guide
Account & Billing	Billing & Plans	Your plan, card, invoices and upgrades.

Back Office (only for CostGlass staff)

If you see an extra amber Back Office section, your account is a CostGlass platform operator. Customers do not have it.

Plan gating: greyed-out items

A menu item your plan does not include is greyed out with a padlock beside it. Clicking it does not open the page; it shows a message such as Available on the Growth, Scale, Enterprise plans.

Item	Minimum plan
Kubernetes Costs, Virtual Tagging, Commitments, Instance Scheduler, Uptime	Growth
Single sign-on	Scale

Note

The padlock is a convenience. The real enforcement happens on the server for each feature, so a feature that is not in your plan is refused even if you reach the page another way. Some pages (Incidents and Support & Requests) are not greyed out in the menu but their data is available on Growth and above, so a Free or Starter organisation can see them empty.

The top bar

Currency selector

The globe button with a code such as USD $ chooses how money is shown: US dollars, euros or pounds. It changes the display only: amounts are stored in the provider's currency and in dollars, and converted at a live exchange rate when shown. Your choice is remembered in your browser and applies to Cost Explorer, Reports and the Dashboard. See the glossary in Welcome.

Language selector

Choose English, Spanish, German or French. Not every page and message is translated yet, so you will still see some English text. The language is remembered in your browser. These guides are written in English.

Security and the status pill

Security opens the security architecture page. The green Operational pill sits in the sidebar, just above Documentation, and is a static indicator.

User menu

Your name opens a menu with My Profile, Cloud & Settings (which goes to Cloud Accounts) and Logout. It also shows your organisation and role.

Search

There is no global search box in the top bar. Search is local to a page: Cloud Resources, Reports and others have their own search box and filters, and the documentation has its own search.

Light and dark themes

CostGlass uses one dark theme. There is no light/dark switch.

CostGlass AI

CostGlass AI is the built-in assistant. It appears as a button on Cost Explorer, Reports, Anomalies, Forecasting, Savings, Kubernetes Costs and Cloud Accounts. Click it to open a side panel.

On each page it analyses what you are looking at and answers questions in plain English. On Cloud Accounts it helps diagnose a connection that is stuck.
On Cost Explorer it can also suggest filters; you choose whether to apply them.
Anything it says about amounts comes from your own data. Treat it as a helper, and check important figures on the page itself.
Each organisation has a daily allowance of AI requests. If it is used up you will be told and it resets the next day.

Copying links to a view (permalinks)

Cost Explorer and Reports write your selections into the address bar as you work, for example the grouping, date range, filters and currency. Copy the address and send it, and a colleague in your organisation opens the same view. The Reports and Cloud Resources pages also have a Copy link button.

A link contains no password, token or organisation id. It only works for signed-in users of the same organisation.
Nothing is stored on a server: the link just describes the view. If someone opens it while signed out, they land on the sign-in page and the link is lost.
Settings that match the defaults are left out, so the address stays short.

Browser cache and Refresh

To keep pages quick, CostGlass remembers the answers for the heavy read-only pages in your browser for one hour. This covers the Dashboard, Cost Explorer, Reports, Kubernetes Costs, Unit Economics, Forecasting, Savings, Rightsizing, Instance Scheduler and Cloud Resources.

A different selection (a new filter, a new date range) is fetched fresh the first time, then remembered.
Anything you change (connecting an account, running a sync, applying a recommendation, changing a schedule) clears the remembered answers, so your own changes show immediately.
Changes made elsewhere, such as by a teammate or a background sync finishing, can take up to an hour to show up. Use the page's Refresh button (Cost Explorer has one; Cloud Resources has Refresh Inventory) to fetch fresh data straight away.
Each user has their own cache; signing out clears it.

Tip

If a number looks stale after something changed outside CostGlass, press the page's Refresh button before assuming the data is wrong.

A page I expected is greyed out. How do I get it?

It belongs to a higher plan. Click the item to see which, then upgrade under Settings → Billing & Plans.

Why do two colleagues see different numbers?

Usually one is limited to part of the organisation through the hierarchy, or they have a different currency selected. Different cached answers can also differ for up to an hour: press Refresh.

Where did the old Cloud Spend page go?

It was merged into the Dashboard and Cost Explorer. Old bookmarks open the Dashboard.

Can I change the order of the sidebar?

No. The sidebar is fixed. You can customise the Dashboard layout, which is saved per user.

All Documentation Guides

Welcome to CostGlass — What CostGlass does, who it is for, how your data gets in, the plans and regions, and a plain-English glossary.
Quickstart: your first hour — Sign up, connect a first cloud, invite your team, set a budget and turn on anomaly alerts, with a first-week checklist.
Finding your way around — A tour of the sidebar, top bar and page controls: what every page answers, plan gating, currency, language, links and caching.
Dashboards — The Overview dashboard widget by widget, plus building custom dashboards you can share with your organisation.
Cloud Resources — The multi-cloud inventory: filters, search, categories, estimated cost, terminated resources and CSV or Excel export.
Uptime, incidents & support requests — Monitor public endpoints, route alerts, see incidents and raise requests to CostGlass engineers.
How CostGlass accesses your data — Security and data ingestion architecture: how CostGlass reads multi-cloud billing and telemetry through read-only roles and least-privilege permissions.
Dashboard & Platform Screenshot Tour — Visual walkthrough of the CostGlass interface with screenshots covering multi-cloud spend, Cost Explorer, anomalies, Kubernetes allocation, and savings.
Connecting your clouds: overview — Every cloud and service you can connect, how each one connects, what access it needs, how long data takes and your plan limits.
Connect AWS (CloudFormation) — Deploy the generated CloudFormation template, choose organization or single account and optional features, then verify.
Connect AWS with Terraform instead of CloudFormation — A Terraform equivalent of the generated AWS template, with an Organization variant and a way to compare it to the wizard.
Connect Azure — Admin consent for the CostGlass application, Reader and Cost Management Reader roles, management group or subscription scope, and a Terraform version.
Connect Google Cloud — Enable the FOCUS BigQuery export, run the IAM grants CostGlass prints, verify, and a Terraform version.
Managing connected accounts — The Cloud Accounts page: statuses, syncing, errors, naming, disconnecting, and the FOCUS 1.0 and CUR Export pages.
Connect Oracle Cloud (OCI) — Give CostGlass read-only access to Oracle Cost and Usage Reports with a Resource Manager stack or your own Terraform.
Connect Alibaba Cloud — Connect Alibaba Cloud through Bill Subscription files in OSS and a read-only RAM role created by a ROS template.
Connect DigitalOcean — Connect DigitalOcean accounts with a read-only personal access token and see invoices by month.
Connect Akamai / Linode — Connect Linode (Akamai Connected Cloud) accounts with an account read-only token.
Connect Cloudflare — Connect Cloudflare usage-based charges with a Billing Read account token and see credits and unpaid debt.
Connect OpenAI, Anthropic, Datadog and Snowflake — Connect AI and software vendors with admin keys or a Snowflake key pair so their spend sits beside your cloud costs.
Cost Explorer — Slice, compare and drill into spend across every connected cloud: group by, filters, charts, overlays, details, AI, links and export.
Saved views, saved filters & scheduled emails — Keep, share and email the Cost Explorer views you use often, and reuse include/exclude filters across views and reports.
Reports — Build, compare, export, save and schedule spend reports, with presets, Excel, CSV and PDF exports.
SaaS & AI Spend — Spend and token analytics for OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Datadog, Snowflake and cloud AI services.
Unit Economics — Cost per business unit: define metrics, send volumes, set targets and alerts.
Connect a Kubernetes cluster — Install OpenCost and the CostGlass exporter in your cluster so cost data is pushed to CostGlass every 15 minutes.
Kubernetes Costs page — Understand cluster, namespace, workload and pod costs, idle capacity, rightsizing, carbon and health.
Tagging strategy: getting the most from tags — How to tag cloud resources, enforce tagging, and when to use cloud tags or virtual tags in CostGlass.
Tag Explorer — Group billed spend by the value of a tag, see tag coverage per cloud and drill into resources.
Tag Compliance — Define required AWS tags, measure compliance, and fix missing tags with Quick Tag, batch apply or a CLI script.
Virtual tagging — Allocate spend by team, product or environment with rules, no cloud changes, with a rule builder and CostGlass AI.
Forecasting — Forecast month-end spend, the next months and a yearly run-rate, and simulate the cost of changes.
Budgets — Create spending limits for a cloud, account, service or team, and see how CostGlass budgets differ from native AWS, Azure and Google budgets.
Anomaly detection — How CostGlass finds unusual daily cost, how to tune it, explain it and be notified.
Cost alerts — Alert when spend rises versus the previous day, week, month or quarter.
All alert and notification types — A comparison of every alert and notification in CostGlass, with channel setup and testing.
Issues & annotations — Dated notes on spend, and a lightweight issue tracker for cost work with Jira push.
Savings playbook — A prioritised, step-by-step programme for reducing your cloud bill, with a 30/60/90-day plan.
Savings recommendations — How the Savings page finds, prices and tracks savings for every connected cloud and platform.
Rightsizing — Find servers and databases that are too big, or too small, using real CPU and memory measurements.
Commitments: Savings Plans & Reserved Instances — Track coverage, utilisation, expiry and purchase recommendations for Savings Plans, Reservations and committed use discounts.
Instance Scheduler — Start and stop non-production servers on a weekly schedule to stop paying for idle hours.
Giving your team access — Invite people, choose Owner, Admin or Member roles, remove users and limit what they see.
Setting up your organisation hierarchy — Build a tree of nodes, place cloud accounts by hand, rule or CSV, and scope people to a branch.
Designing your hierarchy (with enterprise examples) — Principles and worked patterns for AWS Organizations, single accounts, multi-cloud groups, MSPs and regulated regions.
Single sign-on (SAML & OIDC) — Connect Okta, Entra ID, Google Workspace or another provider, verify your domain, test and require SSO.
API keys & AI assistants (MCP) — Create API keys and connect Claude Desktop, Cursor or Claude Code to your cost data.
Audit log — See who changed what and when, with before and after values, kept for 24 months.
Data residency & retention — Your fixed region, how long cost history is kept, purge now and the data handling summary.
Notification settings, Jira & chat — Weekly spend summary, Slack and Teams webhooks, and connecting Jira Cloud.
Troubleshooting & Common Setup Fixes — Solutions for common cloud connection and ingestion issues across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OCI, Alibaba Cloud, Kubernetes, and SSO.

Finding your way around