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Cortex Data connects a business-metrics source, the place your revenue, charges and subscriptions already live, to your Cortex account. Once it is connected you can ask metric questions in an ordinary chat and get an answer computed from your own numbers, and you can keep the chart it draws as a block on the thread. It appears as the Data card at the top of the Connectors page, described there as Ask about connected business metrics and pin a chart on the thread. This page covers connecting it, choosing where it is available, the questions it can answer, the two accuracy rules worth knowing before you quote a figure, and what each connection state means.

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Connect Data

1

Open Connectors and find the Data card

Data sits above the connector catalogue. On a deployment where no metrics source is configured there is no Connect Data control at all, which is the honest signal that the feature is not set up rather than broken.
2

Choose Connect Data and sign in

Signing in happens with the provider you already use for your billing data, on the provider’s own page. The connection is made with your own account. Cortex never sees your password.
3

Choose where Data is available

Under Where Data is available, turn it on for Chat, for Code, or for both. At least one is required: the rule on the card reads Data has to stay available to Cortex Chat, Cortex Code, or both. and turning off the last one answers Choose at least one.
While the sign-in comes back you see a short Connecting Data screen and then Finishing…. If you close the provider’s page instead of approving it, you get The connection was cancelled with Nothing was connected. You can try again from Connectors. If the sign-in itself did not complete, the message is The connection did not finish, again with nothing connected. Both offer Back to Connectors.
Connecting Data needs a signed-in account. A guest is refused before anything is created, because a guest session cannot be signed back into to revoke the connection later.

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Where Data can be used

Where only one surface is on, the card carries the shorthand badge Chat only or Code only. Change the surfaces by pressing the chips on the connected card; there is nothing to sign in to again.

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Ask a metric question

With Data on for Chat, ask in plain language: what charges looked like last quarter, what the current annual recurring revenue is, how this month compares with the last one. Three things can happen in a turn.
  • Look up a metric. Revenue, successful charges or subscriptions over a window.
  • Investigate a metric. The same figure plus the period before it, so the answer has something to compare against.
  • Write a dashboard. The chart is pinned onto the conversation as a block that stays on the thread, rather than a picture you have to ask for again.
For charges the windows offered are the last 30 days, which is the default, this quarter, and this year. Long result sets are paginated, and past a large number of pages the answer is marked as truncated rather than quietly cut short. While a chart is being drawn the block reads Preparing the chart…. A finished chart labels each point as {label}: {value} and carries a Source line back to where the figures came from. Where the figures arrived but cannot be plotted you get No series to plot., and where the drawing itself failed, The chart could not be drawn. In both cases the numbers in the answer stand; it is the picture that is missing.

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Two rules that keep the numbers honest

Annual recurring revenue is computed from active subscriptions, annualised. It is not a sum of past charges relabelled as recurring revenue, so it will not match a charges total for the same window, and it is not supposed to.A book of business in more than one currency is refused, not totalled. Cortex will not add two currencies together and present the sum as a figure. A zero-amount row in another currency does not trigger this.

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Connection states

Disconnect turns Data off everywhere and removes the connection. When an action cannot be completed, the product names which one it was: Data could not be connected, Data could not be updated, or Data could not be disconnected. Nothing is half-applied. There is no published per-day allowance for metric questions. Where a limit applies on your plan or your deployment, the turn tells you at the point it stops.