SolarWinds today added a SolarWindsAI Agent to its IT service management (ITSM) platform that provides a conversational interface through which a wide range of observability tasks can now be automated.
Additionally, SolarWinds is previewing AI Query Assist, a tool that suggests ways to optimize queries by analyzing patterns.
SolarWinds also announced it is making generally available an Enhanced Root Cause Assist for SolarWinds Observability tool that analyzes alerts, anomalies, and events to quickly identify the root cause of an incident and initiate remediation.
Finally, SolarWinds has also expanded a dynamic threshold alerts capability to include more metrics and control over how alerts are created, versus relying on a static set of thresholds that typically generate alerts that are often not especially relevant.
Cullen Childress, chief product officer for SolarWinds, said the SolarWindsAI Agent will make it possible for IT teams to both use natural language to query log data collected by SolarWinds and, with permission, allow the AI agent to trigger actions.
The SolarWindsAI Agent extends the scope of the AI capabilities that have been previously added to the SolarWinds ITSM platform, which are based on a SolarWinds AI by Design framework that the company developed to ensure best practices are followed when deploying AI tools.
Each IT team will need to decide how much faith to put in AI agents to automate specific tasks, but there is a wide range of tedious tasks that could be automatically assigned to an AI agent, including, for example, updating an operating system to eliminate a vulnerability. AI agents rely on large language models (LLMs) to probabilistically surface recommendations that they can then autonomously execute if permitted. IT teams, however, will still need to make sure those tasks have been correctly implemented.
The overall goal is to reduce the amount of time currently required to respond to any given IT incident by eliminating many of the manual observability tasks that previously needed to be executed to identify the root cause of a problem, said Childress.
Hopefully, as IT environments continue to become more complex, they will, paradoxically, become easier to manage without requiring specialists who have the programming expertise currently required to make use of observability tools. In effect, the management of IT is being democratized using AI agents that can now identify, formulate and launch a suggested set of queries to identify any underlying issue.
That capability, in addition to reducing the total cost of IT labor, might also one day afford organizations the ability to reorganize how their IT teams are structured. Just as importantly, AI agents should also enable organizations to deploy more applications without necessarily having to significantly increase the overall size of the IT staff.
In the meantime, IT teams would be well advised to start identifying tedious tasks that might be better handled by an AI agent. It’s not likely AI agents will replace the need for IT professionals, but it is all but certain that the way IT is managed is about to fundamentally change, largely for the better.
