Filtering every report at once
The chips along the top of CloudMonitor are global. Set them once and every report that supports them uses the same selection until you change it. A screen hides any global filter its data cannot honor.
There are four, plus one personal setting that lives elsewhere.
Period
Section titled “Period”The date range used by reports that support a cost window. 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.
The Period chip shows the preset name. Hover over it to see the exact dates. This is especially useful for financial-year presets, whose boundaries depend on your workspace setting.
Where a report compares against the previous period, CloudMonitor uses the equal-length window immediately before your chosen one.
Older periods come in whole months
Section titled “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 name
Section titled “Provider name”Which cloud or vendor the spend came from. Only providers with actual spend in your data appear.
Cost group
Section titled “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.
Virtual Tags
Section titled “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
Section titled “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. See effective cost vs billed cost.
Why a filter is sometimes hidden
Section titled “Why a filter is sometimes hidden”Not every filter makes sense on every report, and CloudMonitor would rather say so than pretend.
A chip that a page cannot honor is hidden. Its selection stays in the global state and applies again when you return to a report that supports it. Real examples:
| Where | What happens | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Unallocated Costs | Cost group hidden | Unallocated cost is, by definition, spend outside every cost group |
| Savings and WAF Recommendations | Period hidden | These are findings, not spend over a window |
| Budgets & Forecasts | Period, Provider name and Virtual Tags hidden | Each budget uses its own configured period and provider scope; tags do not scope budgets |
| Microsoft 365 Usage, Security and Licensing | Period, Provider name, Cost group and Virtual Tags hidden | These are current tenant snapshots without those cost dimensions; only Licensing uses Cost basis |
| Cowork | Filter bar hidden | Reporting is not available yet, so there is no data scope to change |
| Inside a cost group | Period, Provider name, Cost group and Virtual Tags hidden | The page uses its own cost-group and history scope |
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
Section titled “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.