Today SolarWinds, a provider of simple, powerful, secure observability and IT management software, is announcing new AI capabilities that help organizations cut through IT complexity, strengthen defenses, and move toward autonomous operational resilience. Headlined by the SolarWinds AI Agent, these innovations enable organizations to streamline observability tasks, including monitoring, data analysis, anomaly detection, and incident remediation. Grounded in SolarWinds AI by Design principles, these features extend the trusted Secure by Design philosophy into the age of AI.
“We are announcing a bunch of capabilities,” said Krishna Sai, CTO at SolarWinds. “But the headline is definitely the SolarWinds AI Agent, which is like a digital teammate that lives inside the SolarWinds platform enabling Agentic AI capabilities across our entire portfolio. That’s the headline.”
It’s the most important piece of news being announced, but not the only news.
“We are also announcing a whole set of other capabilities that go with that,” Sai stated. “We are announcing the General Availability of what we call our Root Cause Assist that correlates metrics, logs events, and is able to identify causal relationships in an easy-to-understand report, which greatly helps the time it takes to isolate issues and resolve them. We are also announcing the expansion of our Dynamic Thresholding capability, which also is an AI capability we used earlier, and which determines what’s normal and what’s not without a whole lot of human intervention, across a very large set of metrics. We are also announcing broader availability of our AI Query, which is a capability that we introduced earlier in the year which uses Generative AI to help database teams optimize queries. So there are a few capabilities in addition to the broader introduction of Agentic AI.”
Built on AI by Design principles and expanding the company’s Secure by Design framework into the AI era, the new offerings deliver conversational, agentic AI to daily operations – enhancing detection, diagnostics, and remediation. Sai acknowledged, however, that there has been a flood of news from other companies in the last few months saying basically the same thing.
“2025 is certainly the year of Agentic AI marketing,” he noted. “Our operating principle when it comes to AI is to be responsible and not reactionary. It’s easy to get onto the hype train without really thinking through it carefully. We’ve taken an approach of how can we make it easy, so that things work across hybrid workloads, and across our entire portfolio. These are all things that make us different.
“SolarWinds has always known for our simplicity, which makes products easy to be rolled out, expanded and adopted,” Sai stressed. “A lot of thought has gone into this simplicity. One of the top concerns for customers as they go through their journey is whether their investments in our products are future proofed, or do they require expansive migrations. The architecture that we have built can be leveraged across our portfolio, which means that our customers’ investments are future proofed. We’ve given a lot of thought to responsibility with AI By Design. We’ve been talking about it even before Agentic AI in the past year or so, and core issues around AI like privacy and security. Is there a part where you know the agent is going out of bounds and doing things it’s not supposed to? Do you have the ability to get alerted on them, to track them and remediate them? The new principle we are introducing is around autonomy, boundaries and safety which is extremely important when you talk about Agentic AI. When you have a human in the loop, trust improves. These are all things that we’ve taken a lot of care to build in We’ve always believed the world is going to be hybrid. Cross domain visibility is important. If you don’t have a system that works across those hybrid workloads, you are going to end up with visibility gaps. Anything we do in Agentic AI keeps in mind this hybrid and cross domain. These are the key areas where we have really differentiated ourselves.”
While Agentic AI is new to SolarWinds, other types of AI are not. In the last year, SolarWinds moved from Generative AI to Agentic AI.
“AI is not new to SolarWinds,” Sai said. “We had traditional capabilities in terms of AI machine learning. We used Generative AI in our products last year more broadly, starting with our service management product. With Agentic AI, what is unique is the way we have done it in terms of being able to build this Agentic AI framework, so that all the systems are now able to leverage this capability. Think of this as a shift from our operational resilience to Agentic Operational Resilience. That is a key change with this announcement.”
With this new launch, SolarWinds aims to advance further by helping customers achieve autonomous operational resilience. In this new approach, the company says their customers will spend less time reacting to their IT environment and more time focusing on innovative products and services that will change the world.
“Our customers are always looking for ways to accelerate their time to value,” Sai said. “We took a lot of care to let customers immediately benefit, making sure there is a contextual user experience that is front and centre of the agentic experience that has a direct straight line to the time to value. It addressed the entire stack, not just one or two products. These are all benefits our customers get when they start to utilize these features.”
SolarWinds AI Agent also provides a conversational interface for IT operations, where teams can use natural language to ask questions about their environment.
“Traditionally these things are thought more of as a chatbot, where you can ask very simple things and get some answers,” Sai indicated. “With Agentic AI it’s a lot deeper and there’s a lot more contextual relevance. When you get an alert there is a lot more information that helps with the situation you are dealing with. User experience and simplicity are greatly enhanced from what is traditionally thought to be a very simple chatbot-like experience.”
Apart from the enhanced SolarWinds AI Agent, new announcements include AI Query Assist, which automatically analyzes query patterns to suggest the most optimal rewrites, thus reducing runtime and helping teams cut resource costs.
“Query Assist is a very important capability that is part of our database product,” Sai said. “Our database products really help teams get past that wall [where they need an admin]. We can now leverage the power of AI to be able to look at complex queries and suggest improvements. We introduced it in Tech Preview in April and have gotten really good feedback.”
“Root Cause Assist for General Availability, also referred to earlier, analyzes alerts, anomalies, and events to quickly identify the root cause of an incident and initiate remediation.
“This will automatically look at all the metrics related to alerts and workloads contributing to them and be able to correlate all of them, identify the causal relationships and present an easily understandable and actionable report,” Sai noted. “It is now in General Availability, and has been in tech preview since April.
The other item is the Dynamic Threshold enhancements.
“SolarWinds has expanded its dynamic threshold alerts to include more metrics and offer customers greater flexibility in creating alerts, reducing the complexity linked to many static thresholds,” Sai said. “The big advantage is that traditionally ops teams have had to manually set alerts and thresholds. That has become impossible with the explosion in the number of metrics and alerts. Customers can now automatically look at and leverage across a lot more metrics than they were able to before.”
So what does all this news mean for SolarWinds’ channel partners?
“We believe this opens up a lot of additional channel opportunities as well, to be able to service their customers and maximize revenue potential with things like assisted monitoring, automated incident response and database optimization,” Sai stated. “Being able to offer value added services reduces the need for multiple point tools. It greatly simplifies deployments, and lets them integrate quickly into existing deployments. It’s now easier to have conversations with customers, and also enhances customer stickiness for our channels because we can now offer faster resolution times and reduce noise. It ensures partners can have a confident conversation with customers about the foundation we have built by Secure by Design. So there’s a lot of benefits for our channel partners.”