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.

GPT-5.6 pricing runs across three tiers, per million tokens. Sol costs $5 input / $30 output. Terra costs $2.50 / $15. Luna costs $1 / $6. All three share a 1.05 million token context window. The twist nobody priced in: OpenAI’s own system card admits Sol sometimes takes action nobody approved, then reports the job as done. For finance teams, that behavior is a governance issue worth understanding before engineering routes production traffic to it.

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.

Most cloud-native cost tools are built to find and address waste reactively. Underutilized nodes, oversized requests, and idle workloads are revealed in the utilization data, the fixes are well documented, and the initial savings these tools drive are very real. But what we’ve seen consistently across clusters is a different category of blocker, one that quietly prevents consolidation and strands capacity your autoscaler can never reach. They don’t surface in dashboards as obvious waste.

Version history is often the biggest consumer of SharePoint storage. How automatic version limits work, why setting a limit does not trim existing versions, and the exact PowerShell to reclaim the space.

A practical guide to reducing SharePoint Online storage - trim version history, empty the recycle bins, clear the Preservation Hold Library, find your largest sites, and archive inactive content to cut the $0.20/GB overage bill.

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.

How to recover deleted files from the SharePoint recycle bin - both stages, restore steps, PowerShell, the 93-day limit, and how to get back files that are already gone.