Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Shadow AI and “vibe apps” allow employees to build powerful automations without governance. SolarWinds experts explain why this trend could explode in 2026 — and what IT leaders should watch for.

SolarWinds TechPod returns with its annual IT trends and predictions episode — and 2026 is all about Agentic AI. In this episode of SolarWinds TechPod, hosts Sean Sebring and Chrystal Taylor are joined by Sascha Giese (SolarWinds) and Lauren Okruch (SolarWinds Product Marketing) to break down how AI, ITSM, automation, governance, and resilience will shape IT operations in 2026.

Don't just read the report—learn how to replicate its most impressive results. In our 2025 State of ITSM Report, a select group of top-performing organizations achieved a staggering 54.3% reduction in resolution time by strategically integrating GenAI. This live session moves beyond the data to share their playbook. We'll provide a step-by-step guide on how to pair GenAI with foundational ITSM practices and demonstrate how to weave these tools into your team's daily workflows to achieve maximum efficiency.

In this video, SolarWinds Tech Evangelist Chrystal Taylor and Staff Technical Trainer Cheryl Nomanson walk through a hands-on demo of the SolarWinds AI Agent, currently available for tech preview in SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted.

With the Opsgenie end-of-life deadline (April 5, 2027) fast approaching, you're facing a critical choice: Do you truly need to move your dedicated Incident Response workflow into the complexity of Jira Service Management (JSM) or Compass? If your current process is a reactive treadmill—plagued by alert fatigue, lost context, and constant non-critical paging—the mandated move risks replacing one chaotic toolset with another complex ITSM solution. View this not as a burden, but as a chance to build a standardized, human-centric workflow that solves your biggest pain points and transforms your response from chaos to control.

Tis the season for love... and optimization.

Join SolarWinds CISO Tim Brown and CTO Sai Krishna for the SolarWinds Day Closing Keynote, where they share how SolarWinds is evolving from Secure by Design to AI by Design—a bold next step in building trusted, intelligent, and future-ready IT operations. As organizations adopt AI-driven systems, embedding trust, transparency, and accountability into product development becomes essential. In this forward-looking discussion, Tim and Sai reveal how the AI by Design framework ensures responsible AI adoption while enhancing performance, reliability, and security.

Jon Collins of GigaOm has a nugget of wisdom everyone in tech needs to hear.

A modern service desk goes far beyond basic ticketing, serving as the central engine for IT operations. This THWACKcamp session from SolarWinds Day reveals how to streamline and standardize ITSM workflows, transforming the service desk into a strategic asset that eliminates administrative headaches. SolarWinds Sr. PMM Lauren Okruch and THWACK MVP Jeremy Mayfield, Director of IT at National Sugar Marketing, explore how modern service desks go beyond ticketing to become the hub of IT operations.

This video provides a step-by-step walkthrough for configuring monitoring for Java applications running on Windows using SolarWinds Observability. The demonstration covers the complete process—from adding a new service to instrumenting the application with the Java APM library and verifying connectivity. Topics covered in this video include: This guide is designed for developers, DevOps engineers, and system administrators who need to instrument Java applications on Windows for performance monitoring, distributed tracing, and full-stack observability.