SolarWinds has embedded agentic AI into its IT infrastructure management, monitoring and observability tools to move end-users towards greater operational resilience built on trust.
This emerged at the Johannesburg leg of the SolarWinds World Tour this week. The World Tour, held in cities around the world, brings together SolarWinds specialists, customers, partners and industry experts for practical discussions and demonstrations covering AI, observability and operational resilience. The Africa series of events are being staged by SolarWinds and distribution partner ATS Network Management.
“We’re really excited about where we’re headed with agentic AI,” Dan Hauenstein, VP: Product Marketing at SolarWinds, told customers. He outlined key innovations and the product roadmap, which included announcements in agentic AI that are designed to slash complexity and help drive autonomous IT operations.
Launching in October, SolarWinds will be transforming IT operations with AI-driven insights and automation to enable proactive and predictive resilience and simplify complex hybrid environments.
Hauenstein highlighted the findings of SolarWinds’ 2026 IT Trends Report, which found that 71% of IT professionals believe AI is making their roles more demanding and 41% of frontline managers say AI has not reduced their workload.
“There’s a tug of war between optimism and caution around AI,” he said. “Eighty-three percent of survey respondents say AI is only as effective as the quality and breadth of the data. This is foundational to how we’re thinking about this at SolarWinds. Having that quality data is really critical. But the research shows that only 38% ‘very much’ trust the quality of their data. We’re seeing a trust gap holding people back from AI.”
He said AI has enabled SolarWinds’ vision of trusted and autonomous operational resilience, in which organisations offload more of the heavy lifting to technology.
“SolarWinds now has an extensive AI-powered portfolio focused on driving outcomes for customers across monitoring and observability, incident response and IT service management. We’re moving quickly to ‘portfolio-powered AI’ – from a collection of tools to a much more integrated system,” he said.
Hauenstein said: “We are shifting from AI-augmented humans to human-augmented AI, where humans are guiding AI and putting it to work. The future is about orchestration built on trust. Practical things we can do to bridge AI trust gaps include intentional training, designing AI-driven workflows, applying governance and ensuring that we design trust into the system with a human in the loop, and focus on data visibility and quality.”
Slashing MTTR
In an interactive demo, Raj Pandya and Shaifali Saini, Senior Solutions Engineers at SolarWinds, showed delegates how SolarWinds’ AI and agentic insights transform AIOps by collating multiple similar tickets, diagnosing the root causes of issues and slashing mean time to resolution.
Traditionally, IT professionals would manually move between dashboards, check switches, trace connectivity, rule out ISP issues and correlate anomalies. Now, agentic systems can perform this work automatically – without needing a dashboard – present the root cause and propose fixes. AI and agentic insights are already transforming operations, driving efficiency and overcoming real-world challenges for major enterprises, delegates heard.
Improved partner opportunities
In a partner-focused session at the SolarWinds World Tour, partners discovered how the SolarWinds solutions portfolio and partner benefits offer a range of opportunities for them to grow their businesses.
Sheetal Kalra, Channel Account Manager, Middle East, Turkiye and English-speaking Africa at SolarWinds, encouraged partners to work towards higher partner tiers, where they could benefit from bigger discounts and more enablement.
The SolarWinds World Tour in Johannesburg culminated in the partner awards, where ATS Network Management was named SolarWinds’ African Distributor of the Year; BCX won the South African Partner of the Year award; Datacentrix was recognised as Growth South African Partner of the Year; and Nexio won the award for Emerging South African Partner of the Year.
Share
