Quickstart

ZopNight is ZopDev’s Technology Value OS for AI, Cloud and Human. Connect read-only and it prices every dollar of waste. Grant write and it fixes what you approve, inside guardrails, proved against your actual invoice.

This guide takes you from sign-up to your first priced finding in about five minutes, on a read-only connection. No agents to install, no credit card.

ZopNight sign-in; continue with GitHub, Google, SSO, or email, or create an account.

Before you start

• A way to sign in: a GitHub or Google account, your organisation’s SSO, or an email address. On first sign-in ZopNight creates your organisation, so no invite is needed.
• A cloud account you can grant access on: an AWS account, GCP project, or Azure subscription where you can create an IAM role, service account, or app registration. Snowflake, Databricks, and Red Hat OpenShift connect through the same wizard; Cloud accounts lists what each provider needs.
• Read-only is enough. Discovery, cost, and recommendations all work on a Read-only account. See Cloud permissions for the policies.

Steps

1. Sign in and create your organisation

   Sign in at zop.dev/signin with GitHub, Google, SSO, or email. This shared sign-in page then shows a product picker; choose ZopNight. Your choice is remembered, so next time you go straight in.

   On first sign-in, ZopNight creates your organisation for you, named from your email address: priya.sharma@acme.com becomes Priya Org with a Priya Team. You can rename both later. An optional step lets you invite teammates (email plus role) or skip it. If a name can’t be worked out from your email, you’ll be asked to name the organisation instead.

   Once your organisation is set up, signing in lands you on Home → Overview (or Home → Needs attention if your role can’t view dashboards). Below Home in the sidebar, Pinned holds your own shortcuts: pin a page from its row, × to unpin, drag to reorder, or Reset to go back to the defaults.

   

   Home → Needs attention: account health issues and items waiting for your review, with Pinned shortcuts in the sidebar.

2. Connect a cloud account

   Open Settings → Cloud Accounts → Add Cloud Account. The wizard walks you through five steps: Select Provider, Auth Method, Permission Level (start with Read-only), Setup Guide, and Enter Credentials.

   

   Settings → Cloud Accounts → Add Cloud Account: five steps from choosing the provider to entering credentials.

   For the three main clouds:

   • AWS: paste the account ID. The recommended method is WIF-Assume Role (a keyless cross-account IAM role); the setup guide shows the role and policies to create. See Cloud permissions for the policy JSON.
   • GCP: pick the project. The recommended method is One-Click Connect (sign in with Google; ZopNight provisions and manages a dedicated service account); you can also supply a Service Account Key.
   • Azure: pick a subscription, or a tenant to connect every subscription it can reach. The recommended method is Service Principal (app registration plus client secret); Workload Identity Federation (OIDC, no secret) is also supported.

   Create the role, service account, or app registration on your side, enter its details in the wizard, and click Verify. ZopNight checks the credential live against the provider before it saves anything.

3. Wait for the first scan

   The first scan starts shortly after a successful connect, and a small account usually finishes in minutes. Until your billing data is synced (a daily job), costs show at rack rate; billed cost replaces it resource by resource as billing lines arrive.

   While you wait, you can:

   • Browse Cloud Estate → Inventory: 253 resource types across AWS, Azure, GCP, Databricks, Snowflake and Red Hat OpenShift, three-level nesting, and cascade filters.
   • Open Recommendations → Savings to see each finding with the metric, threshold, action, and projected saving.
   • Configure Governance → Teams so showback reports attribute spend correctly from day one.

   You don’t have to watch the page. ZopNight emails you twice during setup: once when the first scan finishes (what it connected, what it found) and once when your first savings recommendations are priced and settled (estimated monthly savings, a breakdown by category, and the highest-impact items). Each is sent once per organisation, to your admins by default. Switch the recipients to all members, or opt out entirely, in Settings → Notifications → Emails.

4. Validate a finding

   

   Recommendation drawer: the resource, the observation behind the finding, the recommended action, and the monthly saving.

   Pick any high-confidence finding from Recommendations → Savings. Each one ships with:

   • The rule that fired, with its ID.
   • The resource identifier and current configuration.
   • The observed metric and the threshold it crossed.
   • The suggested action (stop, resize, schedule, delete).
   • The projected monthly savings, priced from your billed cost where billing is connected and from rack rate where it isn’t.

5. Decide how much ZopNight may change

   Two settings decide what ZopNight does beyond reporting:

   • The account’s permission level. A Read-only account gets discovery, cost, and recommendations, and schedules can be attached, but ZopNight never starts, stops, or remediates anything on it. Switch an account to Read + Write in Settings → Cloud Accounts when you want schedules to run and fixes to apply. See Read-only vs read + write.
   • How each fix runs. On a Read + Write account, auto-remediable recommendations run one of two ways: Auto (one click, end to end) or Guided (an impact preview and a type-to-confirm step first). Destructive actions such as Pause and Delete can also require an admin’s approval when someone other than an admin starts them. Everything else stays advisory, with a step-by-step “How to fix” playbook. See Auto-remediation.

   The autoscaler has its own three modes (Monitor, Recommend, Autopilot), derived from the same permission level. See Autoscaling.

Troubleshooting

Next steps