Context

Context is the first page you see after you sign in. It shows everything you run and pay for as boxes, the lines between them, and what each box and line costs over the window you pick.

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Start with your bill

With only a bill connected, Context shows your accounts, services, and resources with their cost, but not how they connect. To connect them, grant network access to your cloud account. It’s read-only, needs no agent, and takes one step:

• AWS: select Grant network access in Context to update your CostGraph stack.
• Google Cloud and Azure: select Grant network access and run the command it shows in your cloud shell.

CostGraph then connects your networks, subnets, VMs, clusters, disks, file systems, NAT gateways, and load balancers. See AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure for what each grant includes. For workloads, usage, and live traffic between them, install the CostGraph Agent or the CostGraph Operator.

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Boxes

A box is anything that uses or provides resources. Clusters, nodes, workloads, disks, shared file systems, managed databases, NAT gateways, load balancers, and outside services such as an AI provider are all boxes. Boxes nest. An account holds its regions and the services on its bill, and a region holds its clusters and networks. A cluster holds its nodes, namespaces, and volumes. A namespace holds workloads and volume claims, and a workload holds its containers. Only the top-level groups start open. To open a group, double-click it, or select it and select Expand in the inspector. Each box shows its cost for the window and where that cost comes from:

• Billed: the cost is a line on your bill, such as a node or a NAT gateway.
• Allocated: the box gets a share of a billed cost, such as a workload’s part of its node.
• Not billed: the box costs nothing on its own, such as a namespace.

A billed box breaks its cost into parts. A node, for example, shows what its workloads used and what sat idle.

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Lines

A line shows how two boxes connect. Lines stay hidden until you hover a box. Hovering shows that box’s lines and fades the rest, and the box you select keeps its lines. The following table lists each kind of line. Each line also says how CostGraph knows about it: From inventory, Measured from observed traffic, Configured in your cloud or bill, or Estimated. Configured and estimated lines are dashed.

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Explore

• Select a box to open the inspector. Overview shows cost, the breakdown, usage, and signals such as anomalies and recommendations. Connections lists its lines. Open in CostGraph lists the pages for that box.
• Select Ask GraphAI about the box in the inspector to open the Graph AI panel with the box as context.
• Press / or select Search the graph to search boxes, connections, and signals, or to ask Graph AI a question.
• Press Alt+Left and Alt+Right to move back and forward through the boxes you visited.
• Pick any start and end date up to 90 days apart. The default is the last 7 days.

The URL keeps the window, the selected box, and the open groups, so a shared link opens the same view.

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What each connection adds

Context works with whatever you’ve connected. The following table shows what each connection adds. Two trays sit under the canvas:

• Seen in your traffic, not connected: outside services your workloads talk to that you haven’t connected. Select Connect to open its connect form.
• Billed, not connected yet: providers on your bill that have no boxes on the canvas yet.

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Data notes

When the data behind a box is partial, the box shows a Data note badge, and the inspector says why:

• “Some traffic from this cluster could not be named” appears when a cluster sends traffic CostGraph can’t tie to a named box. Grant network access for that cloud to name it.
• “Connect network tracing to see what this talks to” appears on a cluster without flow tracing.

In a breakdown, (estimated) marks a part that CostGraph estimates, such as a workload’s cost split between CPU and memory.

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Next steps