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Your First Run: From Connected Account to Cost Data

Your First Run

Section titled “Your First Run”

Quick Start gets you signed up and connected. This page covers what happens next: the first sync, how to tell it is working, and what to do once data lands.

1. Connect your first account

Section titled “1. Connect your first account”

Start with one account. You can add the rest later, and one is enough to see whether everything works.

Go to Settings > Cloud Accounts > Add Account and pick your provider. Each has a dedicated guide with the exact permissions:

If you run Kubernetes, connect it after your cloud account, not instead of it. See Connect Kubernetes.

Your credentials are checked before they are saved. If something is wrong, you find out immediately, with a message naming the problem rather than a generic failure. Common ones:

MessageFix
Invalid AWS Access Key ID or Secret Access KeyRe-copy the key. Check for trailing spaces.
AWS credentials lack required permissionsThe role needs Cost Explorer access. ReadOnlyAccess does not include it.
Azure authentication failedCheck the client ID, client secret and tenant ID.
GCP permission deniedThe service account needs Billing Viewer and the BigQuery roles.
GCP credentials are incompleteBoth the project ID and the service account key are required.

Adding a cloud account requires the admin role.

2. Wait for the first sync

Section titled “2. Wait for the first sync”

As soon as the account saves, Xplorr starts pulling the last 30 days of billing data. You do not need to trigger anything or wait for a scheduled run.

This usually takes 10 to 30 minutes. An account with a few months of history finishes quickly; one with heavy usage across many services and regions takes longer.

While it runs, the dashboard shows a banner saying your data is syncing. To check progress, go to Settings > Cloud Accounts and look at the account status:

StatusMeaning
Never syncedNothing has run yet. Normal for the first minute or two.
SyncingIn progress.
Synced OKDone.
Sync failedSomething went wrong. Open the account for the error.

The banner clears when you reload the page after the sync finishes.

3. Check the data landed properly

Section titled “3. Check the data landed properly”

Before trusting any number, spend one minute on Data Health. It tells you whether the sync actually returned data, whether any days are missing, and whether anything looks wrong.

A first sync that reports Healthy means you can rely on what follows. A sync that succeeded but returned nothing is the failure people miss, and this page catches it.

The most common first run surprises:

  • Costs appear but stop a day or two before today. Normal. Providers publish billing data with a lag.
  • No data at all for AWS. Cost Explorer has to be enabled in the AWS console, and takes up to 24 hours to populate after you first enable it.
  • No data at all for GCP. Standard BigQuery billing export is not retroactive, so you only see costs from the date the export was enabled.

4. What you see when data lands

Section titled “4. What you see when data lands”

The dashboard fills in with:

  • Total spend for the current month across connected accounts
  • Cost trend, daily for the last 30 days
  • Top services, ranked by cost
  • Recommendations, once there is enough data to find idle and oversized resources
  • Anomalies, once there is enough history to establish a baseline

Anomaly detection and forecasting both need history before they say anything useful. With 30 days of backfill they start working almost immediately; with a brand new cloud account that has little history, they need time.

5. Where to go next

Section titled “5. Where to go next”

Do these in order. Each takes a few minutes and each pays for itself.

  1. Set a budget. Pick a round number near your current monthly spend. This is the single highest value thing to configure, because it is what tells you about a problem without you looking.
  2. Check recommendations. Idle resources and oversizing are usually the fastest savings, and need no commitment.
  3. Set up tags and allocation. Decide who owns what spend before the question becomes urgent.
  4. Invite your team. Cost work does not survive being one person’s side project.
  5. Connect the rest of your accounts. For AWS Organizations, connecting the management account covers member accounts.

Then, depending on what you run:

After the first run

Section titled “After the first run”

Syncs continue automatically on a daily schedule, so the data stays current without anyone doing anything.

Admins can trigger a sync manually from Settings > Cloud Accounts, limited to 10 per hour.

Troubleshooting

Section titled “Troubleshooting”

The syncing banner has been there for over an hour

Check Settings > Cloud Accounts for the account status. A failure almost always means permissions. The error names the specific problem.

The dashboard shows zero

Check Data Health. If the sync returned no records, the cause is usually a billing export that was never enabled rather than anything in Xplorr.

Only some accounts have data

Each account syncs independently. Check the status of each one.

Costs look lower than my provider console

Compare like for like. The dashboard defaults to the current month, and billing data lags by a day or two. Invoices and Reconciliation exists to compare properly against the actual bill.

Section titled “Related guides”