Does importing usage data count as live monitoring?

No. Imported data is historical — a snapshot of usage you already had, not a live feed. Every dashboard shows a persistent banner when an account has imported data, and it never disappears or gets treated as equivalent to live proxy traffic.

What columns does the CSV need?

Only timestamp and model are required. Everything else — provider, cost_usd, prompt_tokens, completion_tokens, tag_feature, tag_department, tag_user, tag_session, status_code — is optional. You map your actual column headers to these fields in a preview step; there's no fixed pre-defined format to match exactly.

What if my CSV doesn't have a cost column?

If prompt_tokens, completion_tokens, and model are present, cost is calculated using the exact same pricing table the live proxy uses — not a second, separately-maintained one that could drift out of sync.

Does budget enforcement work on imported data?

No, and it never will for this path. There's no live traffic to enforce against — the data is already historical by the time it's imported. Waste Detection, Feature Intelligence, and the other analytics dashboards do work fully against imported data.

Are there limits on what I can import?

5MB or 20,000 rows per file for this evaluation flow, and 5 imports per hour per account.

CSV/OpenTelemetry importer — see your spend without a code change — Cognocient Docs

Upload a CSV or OpenTelemetry span export of your existing LLM usage and see it in the real Cognocient dashboards, with no code changes and no production traffic touched.

Upload a CSV or an OpenTelemetry span export of usage you already have, and see it populate the real Cognocient dashboards immediately — no base_url change, no code change, and nothing in your production traffic is touched.

This is historical data, not live monitoring

Every dashboard page shows a persistent, non-dismissible banner when an account has imported data — it's never presented as if it were real-time. See What each path actually gives you for how this compares to the proxy and the Python wrapper.

CSV format

There's no fixed pre-defined format to match exactly. After you upload a file, a preview step shows your actual column headers and lets you map each one to a Cognocient field — the same flexible-mapping design that makes this usable by a non-technical evaluator, not just an engineer.

Field	Required	Notes
`timestamp`	Yes	ISO 8601, `YYYY-MM-DD [HH:MM:SS]`, or Unix epoch (seconds or ms)
`model`	Yes	e.g. `gpt-4o`, `claude-sonnet-4-6`
`provider`	No	Inferred from the model name if omitted
`cost_usd`	No	Calculated from `prompt_tokens` + `completion_tokens` + `model` if omitted, using the same pricing table the live proxy uses
`prompt_tokens` / `completion_tokens`	No	Required only if `cost_usd` isn't provided
`tag_feature` / `tag_department` / `tag_user` / `tag_session`	No	Same attribution model as the proxy's `X-Cost-*` headers
`status_code`	No	Defaults to 200

timestamp,model,cost_usd,tag_feature,tag_department
2026-06-01T10:23:00Z,gpt-4o,0.0142,support-bot,customer-success
2026-06-01T10:24:11Z,claude-sonnet-4-6,0.0089,support-bot,customer-success

OpenTelemetry span export

For prospects already using OTel instrumentation, upload a span export JSON (resourceSpans[].scopeSpans[].spans[]). Span attributes are mapped automatically using GenAI semantic-convention names — gen_ai.request.model, gen_ai.usage.input_tokens, gen_ai.usage.output_tokens, gen_ai.system, and a few common aliases — with no manual mapping step, since OTel attribute names already follow a standard convention.

What works, and what doesn't

Fully functional against imported data: Feature Intelligence, Token Maxing, Context Tax, Waste Detection, and Forecast. Retry detection and context-bloat detection are replayed against the imported batch so these dashboards show real, non-zero results, not just empty defaults.

Not available for imported data, ever: pre-call budget enforcement (block/degrade/alert-before-it-fires) and the Failure Loop Breaker's active state. There's no live traffic for either to act on — enforcement pages show an explicit "not currently enforcing" notice for imported-only accounts rather than a misleading blank or fake-active state.

CSV/OpenTelemetry importer — see your spend without a code change

CSV format

OpenTelemetry span export

What works, and what doesn't

Frequently asked questions

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