Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on private, domain-specific data can unlock significant value for your specific use case. When done correctly, you can create AI apps that understand your organization’s unique context. These apps can speak your brand’s voice and deliver remarkably accurate results that general models cannot match. However, finetuning is not always the right solution. Many teams rush into this complex technique without exploring simpler alternatives first.
To mark the launch, we’re publishing Agentic AI Essentials, a four-part series to help organizations navigate the reality of agentic AI adoption. Across the series, we’ll look at the questions that matter most: what’s real versus hype, how to avoid adoption pitfalls, how to measure ROI, and how roles will evolve once agents are onboarded. Here’s a sneak peek at what’s in store.
IT operations are changing faster than most people realize, making autonomous IT a 2026 reality, not a distant vision. Your team monitors tens of thousands of metrics, ingests terabytes of logs, and generates thousands of alerts daily. And somehow, you still find out about outages from customers before you see them in your tools. That gap between having visibility and actually understanding what’s happening has become the central problem.
Jacky Leybman from PagerDuty and Kaninie Knight from Slack share how their integration streamlines incident response and real-time collaboration. This session highlights practical workflows and measurable gains – such as faster triage and lower MTTR – achieved by connecting on-call operations directly in Slack.
On this episode of Masters of Data, we unpack David's new white paper on AI governance for agentic systems. He explains model context protocol (MCP) as "APIs for agents", how AI systems talk and execute tasks. The catch? Autonomous agents are insider threats that move fast and cause serious damage. David introduces the Model Control Plane (MoCop), a twelve-pillar framework designed to prevent your AI from going rogue. We cover his roadmap for security leaders to build real controls and telemetry. His advice: treat agents like interns with root access. Get ahead of this before your agents do.
Autonomous operations are already here. Ask a question in Slack, and RITA resolves it instantly using your internal knowledge. No ticket. No waiting. That’s agentic AI.
In this demo, we use Kentik AI Advisor to troubleshoot a real-world BGP misconfiguration that brings down a peering session with a transit provider. You’ll see how AI Advisor works both as a dedicated page and as an in-portal overlay, using natural language to identify the affected interface, correlate SNMP and syslog data, and pinpoint a maximum-prefix issue as the root cause. Then we accelerate and standardize the workflow with custom network context and AI-powered runbooks, so every engineer can troubleshoot BGP alerts like an expert.
Wasting time fixing broken SQL scripts? Tony and Tonie check out SQL Prompt AI, which cleans up smart quotes and other chaos in seconds, so you can get back to real work.
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.