Working with tables

Most CloudMonitor reports are one control in different clothes. Learn it on The Ledger and you can drive every other grid in the product.

Grouping is the main move

Group by decides how rows are rolled up — by service, by subscription, by cost group, by region, by a virtual tag. You can stack up to three levels, which is what turns a flat bill into an explanation.

A useful pattern: group by cost group, then service, then resource. Expand the group that’s grown, then the service inside it, and you’ve gone from “we spent more this month” to “this specific resource, in this team” in three clicks.

Expanding a group loads only that group’s next level, so a large estate stays quick.

”Others”

Where there’s a long tail, CloudMonitor shows the biggest groups and rolls the rest into a row called Others. That row is an exact total of everything not shown, not a sample or an estimate — the column still adds up to your real total.

Sorting and paging

Click a column heading to sort. Every table pages rather than rendering thousands of rows: choose 10, 20, 50, 100 or 250 per page, starting at 10.

If a number looks wrong, check the page size before anything else — a total at the bottom of a table covers the whole result, not just the page you’re looking at.

Saved views

Once you’ve arranged a report the way you want it — grouping, sorting, filters, visible columns — the Views button saves that arrangement so you don’t rebuild it every Monday.

• Save current as… names the arrangement.
• Clicking a saved view applies it.
• A dot on the button means you’ve changed something since you saved it.

Views are per-report and per-person. Your saved views on The Ledger don’t affect anyone else’s, and they don’t follow you to another report.

The page address updates to match the view you’re using, so a link you copy opens on the same arrangement for whoever you send it to — as long as they can see the data.

You don’t have to save it to keep it

Rearranging a report and stepping away no longer loses the arrangement. Grouping, sorting, filters, visible columns and page size come back when you return to that report in the same browser tab, so opening a cost group from a grid and coming back doesn’t drop you on the default layout.

The same applies to the tab you were on and to the table-or-map switch. Each surface remembers separately — switching one worklist to a different tab doesn’t move its neighbours, and a screen you open in a settings page remembers apart from the same screen opened read-only.

A link still wins. Follow a link that names a tab and you land on that tab, whatever you were last looking at — otherwise a shared link would open somewhere different for every recipient. And if a remembered tab has since gone, the screen falls back to its default rather than showing you nothing.

That memory lasts for the browser tab and no longer. Close the tab and the report is back to its default — which is deliberate, because an arrangement that quietly persisted for weeks is how a narrowed filter you’d forgotten about starts looking like missing data.

So the two work together: the tab remembers what you were just doing, and a saved view is for an arrangement you want next Monday.

Getting to the resource itself

Where a row maps to a real thing in Azure, its ⋮ menu offers Open in Azure portal. It’s the fastest route from “this line is expensive” to doing something about it, and it works on resources, resource groups, subscriptions and virtual machines.

The same menu is where triage lives on findings screens — commenting, postponing or dismissing an item. See Roles and access for who can do that.

Charts

Charts follow the same filters as the table beside them, and several offer a small control in the top-right to switch chart type where more than one view makes sense.

Charts are for spotting the shape of something; the table beside them is where the exact numbers live. If the two ever seem to disagree, the table is what reconciles.