1. What makes the SolarWinds AI Agent different from other AI assistants or copilots?
A: The SolarWinds AI Agent isn’t a chatbot or a helpdesk add-on. It’s a context-aware, operational teammate designed for IT professionals. It works across observability, incident response, and service management to automatically summarise outages, diagnose root causes, and suggest remediation steps in real time.
What makes it different is that it’s built into SolarWinds Observability and Service Desk, meaning it can answer questions and take action across systems. It’s designed to help teams move from firefighting to achieving what we call autonomous operational resilience, where IT teams can run smarter and faster with minimal manual intervention.
2. You’ve used the term “autonomous operational resilience.” What does that look like in practice?
A: It refers to the ability for IT systems to self-heal, self-optimise, and self-learn. Traditional resilience means reacting when things go wrong, while autonomous resilience means anticipating and preventing issues before they cause downtime.
For example, an AI Agent can correlate incidents, run diagnostics, and trigger automated runbook execution before a human even gets involved. Over time, these intelligent workflows build systems that adapt and recover on their own, freeing IT professionals to focus on innovation rather than constant firefighting.
3. What role does trust and security play when embedding AI into IT operations?
A: Trust and security need to sit at the heart of any AI strategy. Security is what makes trust possible, because if systems and data aren’t protected, the rest doesn’t matter. From there, transparency builds confidence by helping users understand how decisions are made and ensuring those actions can be verified.
For example, SolarWinds has applied its long-standing Secure by Design principles to the development of its AI capabilities through what it calls AI by Design. This approach emphasises governance, explainability, and auditability, so users can see why an AI recommendation was made and confirm that it operates safely within their environment.
4. Many teams already use AI or automation in parts of their stack. How is an agentic AI approach different?
A: The difference lies in context and autonomy. Traditional automation can handle specific tasks in isolation, but agentic AI can understand what’s happening across systems and decide the next best action.
Take database management, for instance. Our latest State of the DBA Report found that nearly nine in 10 Database Administrators (DBAs) across ANZ already use GenAI tools, but most say it hasn’t actually reduced their workload. Many still spend more than a quarter of their week dealing with incidents and outages. The AI Agent is designed to change that, using contextual awareness to identify patterns, link related issues, and suggest or trigger resolutions automatically. For example, a DBA could ask any AI system out there to help optimise a query. Still, the built-in AI Query Assist feature will use metrics and baselines from the actual database before providing an answer.
5. Where do you see AI making the biggest impact for IT teams in the near term?
A: Efficiency and focus. Some recent ITSM research we conducted shows that teams using automation and self-service resolve tickets on average 6 hours faster. And for DBAs, AI-driven tools are already helping 62% of professionals globally diagnose performance issues more quickly and 54% cut time spent on routine tasks.
These efficiency gains add up quickly. AI is giving IT professionals more headspace to focus on projects that drive value rather than just keeping the lights on.
6. How do you see agentic AI evolving in the next year?
A: We’re now moving from AI-assisted to AI-driven operations. For example, the SolarWinds AI Agent can already diagnose problems and recommend fixes. By next year, it will be able to execute automated runbooks, generate new knowledge base content, and correlate incidents across hybrid environments.
In markets like Australia, where 44% of DBAs have considered leaving their jobs due to mounting complexity, these capabilities will be transformative. The goal is to make AI a true digital teammate that lightens workloads, strengthens resilience, and helps IT professionals stay focused on innovation.
Sascha Giese started his IT career in the early 2000s as a network and system administrator in a public school, where he learned that teaching teachers how to use this thing called the internet is more complicated than resolving spanning tree problems.
Joining SolarWinds in 2014 as a Solution Engineer, Sascha Giese quickly became a subject matter expert on all products in the SolarWinds portfolio. He contributed significantly to the SolarWinds Certified Professional® (SCP) exams and training curriculum. As a Tech Evangelist, his mission is clear: to bring the often-overlooked human element of IT teams into focus.
Company Bio:
SolarWinds is a leading provider of simple, powerful, secure observability and IT management software built to enable customers to accelerate their digital transformation. Our solutions provide organisations worldwide—regardless of type, size, or complexity—with a comprehensive and unified view of today’s modern, distributed, and hybrid network environments.
