Beyond AI-assisted observability: Is Africa ready for autonomous IT operations?

Abdul Rehman, Senior Regional Sales Director, SolarWinds. Prineel Padayachy, CTO of ATS Network Management. (Image: AI-enhanced)

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SolarWinds’ new Avior agentic AI application offers African enterprises an opportunity to make IT operations more proactive, co-ordinated and efficient, while helping address the shortage of specialised skills needed to manage increasingly complex technology environments.

This is according to Abdul Rehman, SolarWinds’ Senior Regional Sales Director, who describes Avior as a significant milestone for the observability, incident response, database management and IT service management specialist.

Launched earlier this month, Avior builds on SolarWinds’ 25 years of observability experience and feedback from partners and customers. Its focus is on delivering goal-oriented AI agents that can execute tasks autonomously rather than simply responding to questions like conventional AI assistants.

“What differentiates Avior from other agentic AI or AI platforms in general, is that AI agents will give you an answer to the question that you ask. But with Avior, once you assign it a goal, it can execute those steps automatically,” says Rehman.

Avior is a standalone application designed to take on first-line IT operations work, freeing teams to become more strategic and proactively address the needs of their growing digital estates. It works across products and environments, diagnosing issues and pursuing goals from the perspective of an IT operator.

The application operates within strict security guardrails, pairing AI intelligence with a deterministic execution framework. This allows it to pursue predefined goals within clear parameters, approval controls and auditable workflows, giving IT teams a more controlled and repeatable path from insight to action.

For African enterprises, where specialised IT skills are often in short supply, this could make a meaningful difference.

“Across Africa, one of the greatest challenges facing enterprises is not a lack of technology, but the shortage of specialised skills needed to manage increasingly complex IT and security environments,” says Glenn Lazarus, CEO of ATS Network Management.

“Organisations have invested in multiple monitoring, networking, security and infrastructure management solutions, yet these technologies frequently operate in silos. This fragmentation places enormous pressure on IT teams and security operations centres, particularly where specialist resources are already stretched.”

Lazarus believes agentic AI presents an opportunity to bring intelligence together across these environments, enabling greater operational visibility, faster decision-making and more co-ordinated remediation.

“For African enterprises, the convergence of observability, security intelligence and incident response represents an opportunity to improve resilience while maximising existing technology investments.

“Through our African partner network, ATS Network Management is helping organisations understand how innovations such as SolarWinds Avior can address these challenges and deliver measurable business outcomes.

“Africa’s next IT transformation will come from making existing tools work intelligently together, not just buying more of them.”

Rehman says Avior's AI agents come with several pre-built goals, including reducing alert noise.

“Admins don’t want to come into the office to find 300 alerts waiting for them. They can set parameters and goals, then get a report showing which alerts need their attention, which the system can act on, and which are low priority.”

Another important pre-built goal is speeding up root cause analysis.

“In the past, doing an analysis or investigating an incident meant you would need to speak to multiple people in the organisation. If, for example, a ticket was open, you would have to contact the database team, the network team and the applications team, and everyone would eventually blame the network for the issue. Avior carries out the root cause analysis far more efficiently,” he says.

Avior can also help organisations avoid capacity incidents by identifying potential problems before they affect operations.

“Too often, teams discover they’re at capacity when it’s already too late. Avior alerts them earlier when they’re approaching capacity – whether that’s CPU, memory or bandwidth.”

Ahead of audits, it provides evidence of its findings, the actions required and the outcomes achieved. Teams can also use it to orchestrate operational tasks, such as correcting configuration drift and restoring devices to their last-known-good configurations.

Other capabilities include taking snapshots and archiving running configurations on a schedule, flagging devices that fall out of coverage, tracking utilisation and spend to highlight capacity and cost concerns, and supporting asset life cycle management.

However, as organisations move towards more autonomous IT operations, the ability to automate tasks must be balanced with security, stability and appropriate human oversight.

Prineel Padayachy, CTO of ATS Network Management, says IT operations and security operations have traditionally operated in silos, even though incidents rarely respect those boundaries.

“As organisations move towards autonomous IT operations, the challenge goes beyond simply connecting systems and correlating data. A network configuration change intended to improve performance could inadvertently introduce a security vulnerability, while an automated security response could disrupt a business-critical application.

“The next evolution of IT operations must bring observability, security intelligence and incident response together within a unified operational architecture, enabling organisations to make faster, more informed decisions without compromising security, stability or business continuity.”

He believes AI guardrails will be essential to this evolution, ensuring autonomous systems operate within clearly defined policies, permissions and risk thresholds, with appropriate human oversight and accountability for high-impact decisions.

“Ultimately, the true measure of agentic AI will not be how many tasks it can automate, but how confidently organisations can trust it to make informed decisions, take appropriate action and operate safely within established boundaries,” says Padayachy.

Rehman expects Avior to be well received in the pan-African market, where organisations are increasingly embracing cloud, SaaS and AI, but often lack the resources to manage these environments effectively.

“We have seen a major drive towards cloud, SaaS and AI in the region. At the same time, many organisations have capacity issues: they don't have the right people or the right training for the people. Avior can close the capacity gaps and help organisations run more efficiently.”

He emphasises that Avior differs from AI capabilities embedded within individual products because it is a dedicated application whose agents pursue goals across multiple systems and over time.

“Where AI systems live inside the product and help people when they ask questions, Avior is a dedicated application whose agents are pursuing the goals that you defined. And it's not just across our system – it's over multiple systems and over a period of time, so it's learning and evolving as it spends time in your network.

“If you have an AI assistant, Avior can complement that. It is a helping hand in the network for the admins, the C-suite and even finance teams.”

Rehman says the company introduced Avior at the recent SolarWinds World Tour event in Cairo, where it received positive feedback.

“It marks a significant step forward in the value we can offer our customers, while opening up new opportunities with organisations that don’t currently use our products. We’re planning for Avior to become a standalone product, available even to those outside the SolarWinds ecosystem.”

He believes the technology is particularly relevant as African organisations look to embrace AI while getting more value from their existing technology investments.

“In an emerging market like Africa, organisations want to get the most from the solutions they deploy. Avior is one they should consider. And as the region looks to embrace the AI wave, now is the perfect time to introduce it at events such as Africa Tech Festival. We’ll engage with partners through distributors like ATS and show how Avior can add value for existing customers,” he concludes.

SolarWinds and distributor ATS will demonstrate Avior’s capabilities at Africa Tech Festival, taking place at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from 17 to 19 November.

To learn more, visit the SolarWinds-ATS booth at Africa Tech Festival or go to https://www.solarwinds.com/avior.