Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Microsoft's priority cleanup can now delete Preservation Hold Library content despite retention policies and holds. The roles, the query, the approvals and the limits.

Why a Teams chat disappears or shows Unknown User after an employee's account is deleted, where the messages really are, the eDiscovery route, and how to keep leavers' chats.

Why a SharePoint or OneDrive file is marked Archived, who can reactivate it, how long it takes, the 120-day re-archive lock, and the file-level alternative that restores in one click.

What survives when a former employee comes back: the 30-day restore window, the unlicensed OneDrive clocks, inactive mailboxes, and how to give a returning employee their old data.

Most people rebuild the same handful of Explorer queries: the monthly close view, spend by team for the staff meeting, the filter set that isolates a service you’ve been watching for two months. When we shipped query history and favorites earlier this year, it gave you a way to save up to 12 Explorer configurations.

Microsoft Azure Monitor is the native monitoring platform for Azure environments. For teams already running workloads in Azure, it offers an obvious starting point: it's built in, deeply integrated, and parts of it are genuinely free.

GitHub's research found that developers using Copilot completed tasks 55% faster than those who didn't. Tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor, powered by large language models such as Claude or GPT, are designed to automate the tedious parts of programming so engineers can focus on harder, more creative problems. With this. new repos spin up every week. The promise is being kept. But where are the products?

The ServiceNow integration is in Labs now, which means any CloudZero admin can switch it on and start routing cost work into their incident queue the same day. What that gives you is a full loop between the money and the work. A monthly Optimize pass surfaces recommendations with a dollar figure on each one. Pick the ones worth acting on, open incidents for all of them at once, and each ticket shows up carrying the resource, the finding, and the context an engineer needs.

Across a same-store panel of 430 CloudZero customer organizations, AI reached 2.66% of the median company's cloud bill in August 2026, up from 2.61% in July and roughly four times its level a year ago. The 75th percentile crossed 11%. The share of organizations with at least 10% of cloud spend attributed to AI jumped to 28.2% from 23.9%, the largest one-month move that tier has posted. Two-thirds of the panel now spends at least $1,000 a month on AI. The typical bill barely shifted.

Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) puts the user’s desktop at the end of a long delivery chain: the Azure control plane, host pools, session hosts, profile storage, the network, and the endpoint on the user’s desk. Any one of them can make a session feel slow, and none of them looks broken from inside the others. That is why performance work on AVD starts with continuous monitoring across the whole chain rather than at either end of it. Azure Virtual Desktop Monitoring is what closes that gap.