SolarWinds this week introduced a new incident response product and announced AI-based updates to its observability platform and service management product that are aimed at strengthening IT operational resilience.
Squadcast Incident Response comes to SolarWinds from its recent acquisition of Squadcast, and it’s designed to provide a proactive and structured approach to incident response and resolution. Among the capabilities this product provides are AI-powered alert isolation, on-call management, multi-source alert correlation, standardized runbooks, status pages, and Microsoft Teams and Slack integrations, according to SolarWinds. These capabilities will enable faster incident identification to reduce downtime and speed remediation time, SolarWinds says.
“Squadcast brings together comprehensive incident response capabilities to our portfolio and leverages AI to unify on-call management and alert correlation. It standardizes and automates runbooks for faster, more efficient incident resolution,” says Krishna Sai, senior vice president and chief technology officer at SolarWinds.
The company also bolstered its SolarWinds Observability product with new integrations and support for cloud environments, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure. The extended capabilities will provide IT operations teams with a unified view of the entire hybrid IT environment, SolarWinds says.
“Organizations are rarely 100% cloud-native or on-premises, and invariably, assuming otherwise always limits the benefit of modern IT solutions. In reality, most organizations use a hybrid cloud approach; they have workloads that are on-prem, workloads that are on public cloud, workloads around the private cloud, and they often mix different sets of solutions to meet their needs,” Sai says. “Our announcement marks a significant milestone in helping organizations navigate hybrid more confidently, with better visibility, enabling better collaboration and flexibility. And more importantly, it helps organizations be more resilient in a continually evolving IT landscape.”
Also new to the platform is an AI-powered Log Insights feature that surfaces critical information from large volumes of log data to identify patterns, anomalies, and other trends that would indicate potential problems in the environment. These updates are important for monitoring today’s IT environments, Sai says, as networks and applications become more complex. IT teams must be able to detect issues before they become major incidents. Also in the SolarWinds Observability platform is Root Cause Assist, which taps SolarWinds AI to identify the underlying causes of problems or issues by analyzing data and providing contextual insights, automating and accelerating the analysis of application performance issues.
SolarWinds also enhanced its service desk offering with the AI Runbook feature, which automates the manual task of compiling and formatting pre-written operational guides into new runbooks with standardized resolution processes.
“One of the things that we have taken care of in building these AI solutions is to make sure that the overall user experience of how we build AI and roll it out is very, very well-thought-out and very comprehensive in the product,” Sai says. “The adoption of AI is directly proportional to the trust you can build in AI-based decision making.”
Squadcast Incident Response and the AI-based enhancements to the SolarWinds portfolio are available now.
Source:: Network World