# How to Read the Sankey Cost Breakdown: Step by Step

> How to Read the Sankey Cost Breakdown. A practical walkthrough with ZopNight: read-only setup, production excluded by default, reversible at every step.

Source: https://zop.dev/learn/how-to/read-sankey-cost-breakdown
Published: 2026-07-01 · Author: avinash-gaurav · Tags: zopnight, how-to, learn

---

Use the ZopNight Sankey cost flow on the Cost Reports page. 4-column drill-down by Provider, Account, Service, Type, Region, Purchase, or Team with savings overlay and recommendation links.

This is the practical version, the one you can follow in a single sitting. It starts read-only, touches no production resource by default, and every step is reversible, so there is no point at which you are committed to something you cannot undo. Budget about 10 minutes. Before you start you will want: Billing sync configured for accurate cost data; At least one team configured for the Team column; A ZopNight account.

## The steps

1. Open Cost Reports and toggle Flow.
2. Pick a layout.
3. Click a node to drill.
4. Toggle savings overlay.
5. Deep-link to recommendations.
6. Share the URL.

## Why this is safe to do today

The reason this is a low-stakes change is that nothing here is destructive. Scheduling stops and starts resources; it never deletes them, and your data persists across a stop exactly as it does across a normal reboot. Production is excluded by default, actions run in dependency order, and every state change is logged with what triggered it.

If you want the fuller context behind this task, the [FinOps](https://zop.dev/learn/finops) guide covers where it fits, and the [AWS EC2 scheduling](https://zop.dev/zopnight/aws/ec2) page shows the same loop applied to a specific resource.

## Getting started

Getting started is intentionally low-stakes:

- Connect your cloud provider with a read-only role. Nothing is scheduled or changed at this stage.
- Let ZopNight discover your non-production resources and review exactly what it found, filtered by account, region, and status.
- Create a schedule in your timezone and attach the non-production resources or groups you want it to cover.
- Watch the first cycle run, with Slack, Teams, or Google Chat notifications on every start, stop, and failure, then layer in idle cleanup and guided rightsizing.

Production stays excluded by default throughout, and because discovery and recommendations are read-only, you can prove the value before you enable a single action.

## Frequently asked questions

### Why does the Sankey show Live data instead of an updated timestamp?

All breakdowns are served live from cost_records since the cost_breakdown_daily projection was retired in migration 20260427130000. The dataAsOf field stays nil and the UI shows Live data.

### Can I export the Sankey breakdown?

The underlying breakdown endpoint returns JSON and supports filters (providers, resourceTypes, comparePrev, limit). CSV export is available on the Cost Breakdown card.