# Introduction to Zadara Cost and Usage (CAU) Explorer

Zadara Cost and Usage (CAU) Explorer is a centralized analytics tool that
enables organization billing administrators to analyze their usage and costs
across Zadara services.

The CAU Explorer offers both monthly and daily cost
visualizations in graphical and tabular formats, with grouping,
filtering, drill-downs, and CSV export functionality.

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## Early Preview Period

When accessing the CAU Explorer during the Early Preview period, the CAU
Explorer displays an Early Preview notice, informing you of potential
limitations and issues.

By proceeding, you acknowledge and accept these conditions:

### CAU Explorer Availability

## Data flow

The system tracks cost and usage activity for provisioned resources for all
clouds, and pushes that information to a centralized location.

### Estimation

![cau-explorer-estimation-ui](media/cau-explorer-estimation-ui.png)

If the daily scheduled process fails to populate the CAU database due
to a network outage or another issue, the system calculates an estimate
based on historical usage data.
<br/>
Each week, the system attempts to replace estimated entries with actual
usage data.
<br/>
In the table, affected periods are shown with different shading and a
circled question mark icon in the column heading.
<br/>
When you hover over the shaded column in the table or the corresponding
bar in the chart, a tooltip appears with the **Estimation** label.
<br/>

## Data Retention period

Customers can review their historic usage in the CAU Explorer:

* Monthly data is retained for 62 months.
* Daily data is retained for 92 days.

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Both monthly and daily data types are stored in partitioned tables,
that are optimized for cleanup and performance. -->