SolarWinds, a leading provider of simple, powerful, secure observability and IT management software, introduced SW1™, marking a fundamental shift in how IT organizations operate. More than a feature, SW1 is an agentic AI teammate: a governed AI identity built to help move IT teams from reactive problem-solving to autonomous operational resilience, across on-premises data centers, private cloud, public cloud, and the hybrid architectures that connect them. Built on the SolarWinds® Agentic Framework and grounded in AI by Design principles, SW1 gives organizations a single trusted interface to orchestrate AI across their entire environment.
The technology landscape has become increasingly complex, with hybrid environments expanding, multi-cloud now standard, and pressure on IT teams rising. In response, organizations are prioritizing greater visibility, faster detection, and increased automation to drive autonomous operational resilience.
Across both SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted and SaaS, SW1 addresses this new reality enabling IT teams to use natural language to query agents and gain unified insights into system performance, capacity, and health. Built on the SolarWinds Agentic Framework and guided by AI by Design principles, it delivers responsible and secure AI rooted in trust and accountability.
“The organizations succeeding in this new era will be defined by how quickly they can move their IT leadership from managing complexity to driving strategy. SW1 makes that possible, by shifting teams from manual, reactive operations to intelligent, autonomous infrastructure that anticipates problems before users encounter them,” said Mr. Cullen Childress, Chief Product Officer, SolarWinds. “This isn’t just about operational efficiency. It’s about giving your best people the room to architect what comes next, while SW1 handles the operational weight underneath.”
SW1 in the Future
SolarWinds also announced upcoming enhancements to SW1 in the coming quarters, extending it beyond insights to include service reliability, governance, and autonomous issue resolution. New capabilities include:
- Improving operational health: SW1 will predict SLO/SLA risk and enable proactive intervention, including generating runbooks, workflows, and scripts from existing knowledge bases.
- Streamlining onboarding and time-to-value: It will automatically discover unmanaged assets and recommend monitoring coverage, while creating initial dashboards, alerts, and service views.
- Reducing alert noise: SW1 will filter duplicate and low-value alerts, correlate related signals, and surface the most critical, actionable issues.
- Strengthening security and compliance: Built on SolarWinds AI by Design principles, SW1 will extend governance with customer-defined guardrails to help ensure compliant, policy-aligned actions.
From Operator to Orchestrator
SW1 was purpose-built for what’s happening in today’s IT landscape. Moreover, decades of SolarWinds experience and partnerships with industry stakeholders informed just what today’s IT teams would need to navigate the fundamental shift currently taking place. According to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT, 80% of surveyed IT professionals say their role is shifting from operator to orchestrator — taking on new responsibilities like interpreting AI-driven insights (59%), designing intelligent workflows (56%), and validating AI outputs (47%). SW1 is built for exactly that reality — making it easier to gather and act on AI-generated insights, establish trust in AI outputs, and serve as the central command as IT pros build the agentic workflows that increasingly power critical business functions.
Paving the Path to Operational Resilience
When SolarWinds first announced its vision for autonomous operational resilience, the goal was to empower organizations to more seamlessly unify their systems, proactively address issues, and automate workflows across their IT environments. SW1 represents the next step in that vision, and with additional capabilities rolling out throughout 2026, it is designed to grow alongside the teams and organizations it serves.
SW1 is currently available in SolarWinds Observability SaaS and Self-Hosted IT environments. Additional SW1 capabilities will be available throughout 2026.
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