SolarWinds Adds AI Agent and New AI Features to its Management, Observability Platform

New AI Agent capabilities and other expanded AI features are coming to the SolarWinds observability and IT management platform to help enterprises run their operations more efficiently using the power of AI.

The SolarWinds AI Agent, which was announced on October 8, aims to provide IT teams with deeper real-time insights into system operations, incident response, and service management so that IT workers can resolve issues more quickly using natural language, according to the company.

The AI Agent is built to automatically provide outage summaries, incident diagnostics, and lists of probable causes of problems that arise, all while suggesting ways to fix the issues. Bringing the power of AI into a customer’s IT workflows to improve and streamline them is the goal of the new features, the company said.

The SolarWinds AI Agent is now available in tech preview in the company’s SolarWinds Observability SaaS offering and is expected to have broader availability across the rest of its portfolio in 2026.

Two other new AI features are available in the platform immediately, including Root Cause Assist, which promises to cut troubleshooting time for problems, and Dynamic Threshold Enhancements, which aim to reduce noise and false positives. Another new tool, currently in tech preview, is AI Query Assist, designed to enhance database performance.

The additions are built on AI by Design principles and expand the SolarWinds Secure by Design framework, according to the company.

Barb Huelskamp, the global vice president of channels and alliances for SolarWinds, told ChannelE2E that the tools are being added to help enterprises become more resilient in the face of unplanned system outages.

“MSPs and their customers are navigating increasingly distributed and fragile IT environments, creating a critical need for systems that predict issues before they arise, automate responses, and lighten the load on IT teams,” said Huelskamp. “With these updated features, MSPs can resolve incidents faster, leverage natural language for simpler management, and gain actionable insights across distributed environments.”

Other new SolarWinds platform feature additions expected in 2026 include AI Incident Correlation for Service Desk, which will identify related incidents to help find root causes; AI Knowledge Base Generation for Service Desk, which will leverage generative AI to create new knowledge base articles for reference; and Automated Runbook Execution, which will give teams predefined standard operating procedure steps they can use for incident response and diagnostics gathering as they analyze issues.

A Smart Approach to Making Enterprises More Resilient: Analysts

“AI is the future of nearly all security and resilience-related products and capabilities,” Jack Gold, founder and principal analyst at J.Gold Associates, LLC, told ChannelE2E. “Automating observability is necessary as the number and frequency of incidents increase and available human resources become swamped, while IT workers simultaneously try to eliminate false positives. Without reliable assistance, the burden will become unmanageable. AI holds the promise of making this a manageable and more efficient problem to solve.”

Anything that SolarWinds and other vendors can do to make it easier for customers and MSPs means that they can cover more incidents with the limited resources available, said Gold. “This is essentially enabling companies to do more with less. And from SolarWinds, it expands their reach into organizations that may not be able to fully utilize their own service capabilities due to a lack of resources or expertise.”

Another analyst, Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst for AppDev and modernization with theCUBE Research, agrees.

“Rather than bolting AI onto existing workflows, SolarWinds is embedding agentic AI into the core of IT operations, automating diagnostics, remediation, and observability management,” said Nashawaty. “What I find in theCUBE Research shows that nearly half of IT leaders report unexpected outages despite rating their resilience highly, underscoring the gap this release is designed to close. At the same time, 90% of enterprises are actively adopting AI agents, with 79% expecting full-scale adoption within three years.”

For MSPs, the ability to summarize incidents, diagnose root causes, and shorten mean time to resolution across multiple environments could translate directly into greater efficiency and customer value, he added.

“AI-driven resilience is quickly becoming table stakes for enterprises,” said Nashawaty. “Also, in AppDev research, I find that 45% of organizations are likely to experience a software supply chain attack by 2026, and this is a conversation that comes up frequently. It highlights the urgency of proactive, AI-powered defense.”

This gives enterprise leaders a lot to think about, he said.

“As every major vendor races to deliver AI agents, the differentiator will be execution – who can combine automation with governance, transparency, and trust to make enterprises confident enough to let AI act as a true digital teammate,” said Nashawaty.