Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Uber ran out of its entire 2026 AI budget by April. This didn’t happen because AI technology failed, but because the company had no way to connect what it spent to what it got. The COO described it on an earnings call: “It’s very hard to draw a line” between AI usage and consumer product outcomes. And with that one sentence, we have the CFO problem of 2026.

Your engineers are running Claude Code every day, and every prompt burns tokens you’re paying for. Until now, that spend was hard to see. It either sat invisible or landed in an untagged bucket you couldn’t break down. Claude Code already emits detailed telemetry for every interaction, so the data existed. You just had nowhere to send it that would turn it into a cost.

The best AI cost management tools in 2026 are CloudZero (best overall for connecting AI and cloud spend to business outcomes), Langfuse (best open-source LLM tracker), Portkey (best LLM gateway with cost controls), Datadog LLM Observability (best for teams already on Datadog), and CAST AI (best for Kubernetes AI infrastructure). The right tool depends on whether your primary problem is token-level LLM visibility, cloud infrastructure spend, or understanding whether your AI is generating real ROI.

I spend most of my week talking to companies about AI ROI. A few months ago, that was still a weirdly specific conversation. Now it’s everywhere. CloudZero spends a lot of time in that conversation, so I’m glad the market is talking about it. But the conversation tends to start, and stall, in the wrong place. There are two ideas I keep coming back to: That doesn’t mean developer productivity is fake. It’s very real.

Knowing what you're spending on observability is useful. Knowing which team, service, or project is driving that spend is what actually lets you act on that information. Cost attribution is a core part of how Grafana Cloud approaches cost management and optimization.

Until now, allocating by account name meant doing the work yourself: hand-building a custom dimension that mapped every twelve-digit AWS ID to a readable name, then maintaining it by hand in CostFormation. That mapping is fragile. Rename a definition or edit the wrong line and dashboards that depended on it quietly break. Now the account name is built in for accounts connected through AWS CUR 2.0.

A design partner told us the AI Explorer table needed a way to get data out so it could be saved and shared elsewhere. Now you export the whole view in one click, cost, tokens, cache, and model count all included. The values come through as clean numbers, not text you have to scrub. It’s the same pattern as Explorer, so there’s nothing new to learn.

If you pull cost data from a CloudZero Snowflake Data Share, a request for just a few days of data could be surprisingly slow and expensive. Because of how the data was stored, Snowflake had to read far more than the days you asked for. You paid for that in query time and credits.

Managing cloud, AI, and SaaS costs means answering a steady stream of questions from finance, leadership, and engineering teams. What changed? Which team owns the spend? Was an increase expected? Are we still on track against the budget? When each answer requires moving between dashboards, filtering cost data by team or service, or manually correlating billing data with observability data, it can slow down investigations while costs continue to rise.

Kubernetes efficiency metrics now work with infrastructure filters.