---
title: Filtering every report at once
canonical: "https://cloudmonitor.ai/docs/using-cloudmonitor/global-filters/"
description: "The filters along the top of CloudMonitor apply to every report at once. Here is what each one does, and why one is sometimes grayed out."
---

The chips along the top of CloudMonitor are **global**. Set them once and every report you open
honors them until you change them again. No screen has its own private copy, so a number you see on
one page means the same thing on the next.

There are four, plus one personal setting that lives elsewhere.

![The CloudMonitor top bar showing the Period, Provider, Cost group and Virtual Tags filter chips](../../../../assets/docs/global-filter-bar.png)

## Period

The date range every cost figure is measured over. It offers the presets you'd expect —
**Last 30 Days**, **Previous Month**, **Financial Year to Date** and so on — or you can pick your own
dates.

The financial-year presets follow **your** financial year, not the calendar. An admin sets that under
Settings ▸ Workspace Settings, and changing it re-bases every accounting preset immediately.

Those presets show their dates on the chip as well as their name — "Financial Year to Date" tells you
nothing about where your year actually starts, so the chip spells the span out. Every other preset
shows its name alone, because "Last 30 Days" already says what it covers.

Alongside your chosen window, CloudMonitor works out the equal-length window immediately before it,
which is where the "compared to previous period" figures come from.

### Older periods come in whole months

Recent spend is held day by day. Further back it's kept as monthly totals — enough to see the shape
of a year without storing every line of every day forever.

So once you reach back past the recent window, the calendar only accepts whole months, and it says
so: **Only whole months can be selected.** A preset that would land mid-month back there isn't
offered at all, which is why the list of presets is sometimes shorter than you might expect.

There's nothing to configure and nothing has gone wrong. It means a figure for an older period is
always a complete month rather than a part-month that looks like a full one — the failure that would
otherwise be invisible and wrong.

## Provider

Which cloud or vendor the spend came from. Only providers with actual spend in your data appear.

## Cost group

Your own business hierarchy — teams, products, environments, whatever you've set up. Filtering by
cost group is how you turn a whole-organization bill into one department's bill.

:::note[A brand-new cost group shows nothing yet]
A cost group created since the last update is selectable straight away but marked **Pending**:

> Added recently — not included in reporting yet. You can select it now; it will show costs after the next update.

That's expected. Its reports fill in once CloudMonitor next works out which costs belong to it.
:::

## Virtual Tags

Your normalized tags. Pick a tag name, then the values you want — "Environment is any of production,
staging". Values are searched as you type and ranked by spend, so the expensive ones surface first.

Each tag also has an **Unallocated** bucket: spend that no rule matched for that tag. A large one
usually means a tagging gap worth closing.

Virtual-tag selections travel in the page address, so a link you copy carries your filters with it.

## Cost basis is not up here

Whether you see invoiced or usage-based cost is a personal preference, not a filter, so it lives on
[your profile page](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/profile-and-preferences/). See
[effective cost vs billed cost](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/effective-vs-billed-cost/).

## Why a filter is sometimes grayed out

Not every filter makes sense on every report, and CloudMonitor would rather say so than pretend.

A chip that a page cannot honor is either hidden or shown **struck through** — the second happens
when you carried a selection over from another page, so you can see it isn't being applied rather
than wondering why the numbers look wrong. Hover it for the reason. Real examples:

| Where | What happens | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Unallocated Costs | **Cost group** grayed out | Unallocated cost is, by definition, spend outside every cost group |
| Anomalies, Savings, WAF Recommendations | **Period** hidden | These are findings, not spend over a window — they have no date range of their own |
| Budgets & Forecasts | **Period** grayed out | Each budget already has its own configured period |
| Microsoft 365 | **Period** and **Provider** grayed out | These are current snapshots of your tenant, not a cost window |
| Inside a cost group | **Cost group** grayed out | The page is already scoped to one group |

This is deliberate. A filter that silently did nothing would be worse than one that tells you it
doesn't apply here.

## On a narrow screen

The chips fold into a single **Filters** button with a count badge. Tap it for the same controls in a
panel.