Dive Brief:
- SolarWinds launched Avior, a standalone agentic AI system built on its IT management and full-stack observability platform on Wednesday. Avior completes tasks, coordinates multi-agent activity and tracks process in enterprise IT environments, the company said in the release.
- On the security and resilience front, Avior continuously monitors devices, backups, bandwidth and cost, distilling related issues down into single alerts. The AI system also handles IT asset lifecycle management, SolarWinds said.
- SolarWinds aims to cover first-line IT work so teams can focus on strategy and proactive planning for their digital estates. “Until now, AI was mostly an assistive technology,” Krishna Sai, CTO at SolarWinds, told Channel Dive. “While it did help a lot of our IT and operations teams understand their environments better, it wasn’t yet able to operationalize all of that and offload their toil to a system of agents in a transparent, trustworthy manner.”
Dive Insight:
Avior consolidates routine tasks typically handled by network engineers, database administrators, security officers and compliance assistants working in an IT and operations environment, Sai said.
“We’ve mapped all of those roles and tasks into a system of curated goals that are encapsulated in the product,” he said. “It’s like an AI assistant product where you can start with a simple chat session and give it specific tasks, but Avior also comes with a set of curated goals that you can click and scope to your particular environment.”
Avior can handle most routine IT operations tasks. For example, the AI agent can detect out-of-band changes and restore the last-known-good configuration on critical devices, snapshot and archive running configurations on a set schedule, flag any device that falls out of coverage and retire ghost assets that no longer exist but still clutter dashboards.
SolarWinds launched an agentic AI assistant last year that functions as a digital teammate to summarize outages, gather diagnostics, identify probable root causes and suggest remediation steps. The company further expanded the tool, known as SW1, in April. Avior is a separate, more deterministic entity that can take action autonomously.
“The AI assistant experience feels more like an intern: prompted to be helpful with smaller tasks and requires constant oversight, direction and guidance,” Abigail Norman, Avior Product Manager, said in an email. “Avior is deterministic and acts more as an experienced principal. You give it the outcome you want, and Avior will work through the steps, using its judgment to know when to ask for guidance.”
Users can also define Avior’s level of autonomy. By default, Avior requires a human check for irreversible actions.
“You can run it in a conservative mode, where Avior will tell you what it's planning to do. It'll walk you through a set of plans and tasks, and you can approve them, and then it'll go off and do them. You can run it in a balanced mode where Avior will say, ‘Hey, you know, I can handle all the low-risk tasks, but I will always ask for human approval.’ And of course, there's the fully autonomous mode as well.”
Sai added that managed service providers and other partners will play an essential role in extending Avior’s capabilities to customers, particularly those implementing AI with the new system.
“Customers are also looking for partners and channels to be a trusted provider of how to operationalize AI, going from consultation, implementation services, recurring managed operations to things like continuous compliance services and continuous optimization,” Sai said.
Avior is available as SaaS and as a self-hosted product beginning October 14, 2026, through a guided onboarding program, according to SolarWinds.
