--- title: Where your numbers come from canonical: "https://cloudmonitor.ai/docs/reference/where-your-numbers-come-from/" description: "How CloudMonitor gets your cost data, how often it updates, and why a change you just made is not in the reports yet." --- Two questions come up constantly: *is this my real data?* and *why hasn't my change shown up?* This page answers both. ## There are exactly two states CloudMonitor never mixes real and example data on a screen. It's in one of two states, and you can always tell which. | State | Badge | What you're seeing | |---|---|---| | **Demo mode** | **Demo mode** in the top bar | Sample data from a fictional company, app-wide. Nothing is your spend, and changes aren't saved | | **Normal** | none | Your own data — or an honest empty state, or an error | The important half is the second row. When CloudMonitor can't load something, it says so. It does **not** quietly fall back to sample numbers. An empty report is either genuinely empty or genuinely broken, and it will tell you which. Demo mode is switched on per person under [Profile & preferences](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/profile-and-preferences/), so a colleague seeing different numbers to you may simply have it on. ## When things update **Cost data arrives on a schedule**, not continuously. Cloud providers publish usage with their own lag, so the most recent day or two is usually incomplete everywhere — including in the provider's own console. A dip at the right-hand edge of a trend chart is almost always this, not a real drop. **Configuration you change is saved immediately.** Creating a cost group, editing a rule, setting a budget — those persist as soon as you save. **But reports catch up on the next update.** This is the distinction that trips people up: your configuration and your reporting are two different things, and the second follows the first. ### The Pending marker A cost group created since the last update is selectable right away and marked **Pending**: > Added recently — not included in reporting yet. You can select it now; it will show costs after the next update. Filter a report to a pending group and you get an explanation rather than an empty page. Nothing is wrong; the spend simply hasn't been attributed to it yet. The same applies to allocation rules. Write a rule today and the spend it captures moves on the next update, not on save. **Microsoft 365** data syncs daily, which is why a new connection shows *Authorization pending* until the following day. ## What "live" means, area by area Most of CloudMonitor reads your own data. Some parts show worked examples where a feed isn't connected yet, and those are listed on [What isn't available yet](/docs/reference/whats-not-available-yet/). The general shape: - **Cost reporting** — the Ledger, the Cost by… breakdowns, Explorer, Cost Groups, Unallocated Costs, Commitments — reads your data. These reconcile with each other to the cent, because they're the same underlying rows. - **Findings** — anomalies, savings recommendations, WAF findings — are produced from your data, with triage decisions saved against them. - **Configuration** — cost groups, rules, budgets, virtual tags, users — is yours and saved immediately. ## When something fails to load You'll get an error strip at the top of the screen naming what failed. That's deliberate: one visible message beats a panel that quietly shows nothing. If you see one, the numbers on screen may be incomplete. Reload before drawing conclusions, and if it persists, raise it — it's an outage, not a usage question. ## Two numbers that should always agree A useful self-check: open [The Ledger](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/reports/the-ledger/) and your [Overview](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/reports/overview/) with the same Period, provider and cost group selected. The totals should match. If they don't, the near-certain cause is a filter difference — most often the [cost basis](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/effective-vs-billed-cost/), since the Overview's trend chart is always effective cost. Check that before anything else.