User Guide

Getting started

From first login to your first cost report in under 30 minutes.

First-time setup (live installations)#

When you first open CCO after installation, the setup wizard walks you through three steps:

  1. Create your admin account — email, name, and password. This becomes the owner account with full access to all features and settings.
  2. Company information — your organization name. This appears in reports and emails (can be changed later in Settings → Branding).
  3. Upload your license — the .lic file we send after purchase. The wizard shows a preview panel (product, tier, enabled clouds, customer name) so you can confirm before activating.
Tip
After setup, the onboarding tour launches automatically — 8 slides covering Cloud Accounts, Email, SSO, Users, AI, and more. You can re-launch it any time from the Help drawer (? icon on every page).

Connect your first cloud account#

Go to Settings → Cloud Accounts → Connect Account. Select your cloud provider and enter credentials:

Azure
Tenant ID + Service Principal (Client ID, Client Secret). The SP needs "Cost Management Reader" at the root management group level. CCO auto-discovers all accessible subscriptions.
AWS
AWS Organization ID + IAM credentials (Access Key, Secret Key). Needs Cost Explorer and Resource Groups Tagging API read access.
GCP
GCP Organization ID + Service Account JSON key. Needs BigQuery Billing and Resource Manager read access.

After connecting, CCO immediately discovers all subscriptions/accounts and begins the first cost data fetch. The dashboard populates within a few minutes.

Your first cost fetch#

Cost data refreshes automatically every 4 hours via Celery Beat. The first fetch pulls up to 12 months of historical data (depending on your cloud provider's retention). Subsequent fetches only pull the current month.

  • ✓Current month costs cached in Redis for fast loading
  • ✓Historical months stored in PostgreSQL
  • ✓Resource-level data retained for 90 days (for anomaly baselines)
  • ✓Tag costs fetched alongside resource costs (no extra API calls)

Quick wins after setup#

  1. Set up email (Settings → Email) — configure SMTP so CCO can send reports, alerts, and invitations.
  2. Create a budget (Analytics → Budget Section) — set a monthly target for your highest-spend subscription.
  3. Create an alert rule (Alerts → Rules tab) — watch your most important subscription for cost spikes.
  4. Generate recommendations (Recommendations → Generate) — scan all subscriptions for optimization opportunities.
  5. Invite your team (Settings → Users) — add analysts and viewers with appropriate data scoping.

Demo environment#

The demo comes pre-loaded with 24 months of sample data across 4 cloud accounts (2 Azure, 1 AWS, 1 GCP), 8 subscriptions, budgets, alert rules, recommendations, and savings records. All features are enabled with read-only settings.