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How Pathfinder works

Two things, and only two: what happens in what order, and what every word on the site means. Everything else on this site is a screen for one of the five phases below.

Connect a provider

End to end

Read left to right. The phases marked you wait for a person; the ones marked Pathfinder run on their own but stop at the gates named underneath.

  1. Connect

    You

    Register one trust anchor per provider and prove read-only access to it.

    Produces A connection, and the accounts enumerated beneath it

  2. Discover

    Stages A–C

    Pathfinder

    Read the logs, strip personal data, find the applications nobody labelled, and grade how demanding each one's work is.

    Produces Applications, workloads, coverage

    Gate · Curation — you name and merge what was found

  3. Assess

    You

    Select a scope from what discovery already found, and set a replay budget priced from observed traffic.

    Produces An assessment with an approved cap

    Gate · Budget approval

  4. Run

    Stages R1–R3

    Pathfinder

    Propose a target configuration, replay real traffic against it, judge the output, and price the result.

    Produces Measured evidence, and three costed scenarios

    Gate · Replay approval — the only stage that spends money

  5. Report

    You

    Read what it found. Every figure carries the grade of its weakest input, and everything undetermined is declared rather than dropped.

    Produces A report someone who wasn't there can check

Who acts:You — it waits until you do somethingPathfinder — runs on its own, stops at a gateThree gates in the whole flow. Nothing else asks for you.

Glossary

Every term the site uses, defined once.

Your estate

Provider
A system we can read from — a model provider, a gateway, an observability tool or a billing export. Connecting one does not move any traffic through us.
Connection
One trust anchor with one provider: the credential or role that lets us read, and the thing we enumerate accounts beneath. You register it once and reuse it.Sometimes called the connector.
Account
The unit a provider bills and scopes by. Each provider names it differently — a GCP project, an AWS account, an Azure subscription, a gateway workspace — and one connection may hold many.The naming here is still being settled.
Application
A named system of yours that calls models. Discovery finds these; they are almost never labelled in the logs, which is the whole reason a bill reads as one line.
Workload
One distinct model-call pattern inside an application, identified by fingerprint. An application usually has several, and they can cost wildly different amounts.
Dataset
The window of records a connection actually holds — a date range, a set of models, a row count. Assessments read datasets, not live systems.

The exercise

Assessment
The exercise you create. It covers one or more projects, carries a single approved budget across all of them, and belongs to a team.
Project
A scoped unit inside an assessment: which accounts, applications and workloads to look at. The money and the governance sit one level up, on the assessment.
Run configuration
A schedule attached to an assessment — daily, weekly, monthly or on demand. It is what turns a one-off exercise into a periodic one.
Run
One execution of a run configuration, on one date. Runs are kept so you can compare them; a later run does not overwrite an earlier one.
Snapshot
The pinned version of a connection's data that an assessment read. It is why a report does not drift when discovery runs again.
Replay
Re-running a sample of your real traffic against a proposed configuration and judging the output against the original. It is the only step that produces measured evidence, and the only one that spends money.

How we know

Measured
We ran it and observed the result. Only replay produces this.
Logged
Your systems recorded it and we read it. Token counts are logged.
Modelled
Computed from measured or logged inputs through a stated formula. Cost is modelled — tokens against a price list.
Assumed
A default, used because nothing better existed. Assumed figures are labelled everywhere they appear.
Coverage
The share of spend we could actually read and attribute. Reported per connection and rolled up spend-weighted — never quietly averaged.
Unattributed
Spend we can see on the bill but cannot tie to an owner. Declared as its own figure rather than folded into a percentage.
Unread
Spend sitting in accounts nothing is connected to. It appears in no total on the dashboard, and is stated separately so the gap is visible.
The four grades, as they appear on every figure:MEASUREDLOGGEDMODELLEDASSUMED

What we can read from

Access is read-only in every case. Nothing here can write to your cloud, and no traffic is routed through us.

Model providers

  • GV

    Google Vertex AI

    Request logs and model calls from a GCP project

  • AF

    Azure AI Foundry

    Deployment logs and token usage from an Azure subscription

  • BR

    AWS Bedrock

    Invocation logs from CloudWatch and S3 delivery

  • OA

    OpenAI

    Usage and cost from the organisation usage API

  • AN

    Anthropicbeta

    Usage and cost from the workspace admin API

  • DB

    Databricksrequestable

    Model serving endpoints and inference tables

Gateways & routers

  • LL

    LiteLLM

    Proxy request logs with per-key and per-team tags

  • OR

    OpenRouter

    Generation history across routed upstream models

  • PK

    Portkeybeta

    Gateway traces, retries and fallback attributions

Observability

  • LF

    Langfuse

    Traces that link multi-step agent runs into one unit

  • HC

    Helicone

    Per-request cost, model mix and user attribution

  • DD

    Datadog LLM Observabilityrequestable

    Spans and token metrics from existing APM pipelines

  • AM

    Azure Monitor

    Diagnostic settings and Log Analytics queries

Billing & warehouse

  • CB

    Cloud Billing export

    The invoice of record — makes a baseline LOGGED, not assumed

  • BQ

    BigQuery

    Billing and log sinks already landed in a warehouse

  • SF

    Snowflakerequestable

    Cost and usage tables shared into a Snowflake account