Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently published its final verdict on the state of the cloud industry. While the tone may have softened since its initial findings, the conclusion was still damning: hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft continue to unfairly dominate the cloud market through opaque, inflated pricing and technical lock-in strategies.

Two years ago, a “state-of-the-art” AI model could write decent copy or summarize a meeting transcript. Today, the top AI models can generate working code, analyze video in real time, and reason through complex scenarios. For SaaS teams, these changes represent a strategic crossroads. Choose the right model and you unlock new revenue streams, slash time-to-market, and wow your users.

Search isn’t what it used to be. The way people discover information online is shifting. Instead of clicking through search results, many now ask AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity to do the research for them. In March 2025, 13.1% of Google desktop searches featured AI Overviews— doubling from over 6% in January, according to Semrush analysis of 10+ million queries.

A growing number of engineering organizations have adopted or are trialing agentic AI-based coding tools and LLMs in an effort to increase their teams’ development velocity. If you’re a developer, this means you’ve likely had to try out different agentic tools and models and determine how to best incorporate them into your existing workflows.

Generative AI is becoming a core part of modern applications, making it essential to monitor and manage how these services are used. That’s why, today, we’re excited to introduce the Anthropic integration for Grafana Cloud, a new solution that lets you connect directly to the Anthropic Usage and Cost API from within Grafana Cloud.

If your organization is anything like ours, then you’ve probably embraced using large language models like Claude. Just last week, we gave all Honeycomb employees access to Claude. Now, developers can generate AI-assisted code, product managers can perform analysis on customer usage trends, marketers can test messaging, sales can do customer discovery and we are shipping AI-powered features to improve user experience.

Automation has transformed incident response within individual teams. Diagnostic scripts, runbooks, and alert systems help engineers troubleshoot and resolve issues more efficiently. Translating those gains across the organization remains a challenge. Most automations are built in silos and not designed to work together. The result: disconnected workflows, inconsistent outcomes, and too much manual effort, leaving teams with less time for the strategic work that drives innovation and resilience.

Managing the cost of foundation models is a critical challenge as AI adoption surges, particularly for teams using powerful models like Anthropic's Claude Opus and Claude Sonnet. Growing teams generate larger prompt volumes and escalating model complexity, making it difficult to have clear visibility, accountability, and control of cloud AI spending.