Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In this SolarWinds TechPod episode, hosts Chrystal Taylor and Sean Sebring talk with Cheryl Nomanson, a SolarWinds Academy trainer with 14 years at the company. They discuss the importance of technical education for complex software and networks, exploring SolarWinds' comprehensive training offerings including the SolarWinds Academy with its on-demand courses, instructor-led virtual classes, and office hours format. Cheryl explains the SolarWinds Certified Professional (SCP) certification program and the newer SolarWinds Certified Instructor (SCI) program for training partners globally.

Culture already exists in your team. Leaders don’t create it — they either nurture it or destroy it. This is why leadership presence matters.

AI isn’t the real threat to IT careers. The real risk? Not building the skills that AI can augment. Jon Collins breaks down the “AI augmentation gap.”

SolarWinds Evangelist Chrystal Taylor introduces the new routing insights feature in Observability Self-Hosted 2026.1. This first phase enhancement enriches routing table information with detailed context, including forwarding interface names, VRF data, next hop IPs, and timestamps. The update unifies BGP, OSPF, and EIGRP neighbors in a single dashboard, providing visibility into peer identity, flap counts, health status, and admin states.

In this video, SolarWinds Evangelist Chrystal Taylor introduces server configuration comparisons, a new feature in Observability Self-Hosted 2026.1 and Server Configuration Monitor 2026.1. The key highlight is the ability to compare server configurations side by side, enabling users to identify differences in configuration files between nodes or against a defined ideal state. This new functionality aims to help users monitor configuration drift.

SolarWinds Evangelist Chrystal Taylor demonstrates the new cloud entity support features in Observability Self-Hosted version 2026.1. The update adds monitoring capabilities for MySQL and PostgreSQL databases on Google Cloud Platform, GCP load balancers, Azure functions, AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service, and AWS Lambda functions. She provides a guided walkthrough of the dashboard interface, showing how users can monitor various metrics including database performance, network traffic, latency, function execution counts, system usage, and costs across different cloud platforms.

“Best practices” fail when teams forget the principles behind them. Agile. ITIL. DevOps. None of them work without people-first leadership.

As AI deflects routine tickets, technicians are left to resolve the most complex support issues. Learn how a unified Service Desk and remote support workflow reduces tool switching and helps teams resolve incidents faster.

Most IT failures aren’t caused by bad tools. They’re caused by ignoring people. Jon Collins explains why leadership, culture, and trust matter more than Agile, ITIL, or DevOps frameworks.

Rewrite inefficient SQL Server queries in seconds—not hours. In this demo, we show you how AI Query Assist in SolarWinds SQL Sentry transforms the way you tune performance. Watch how to take a problematic query from the "Top SQL" view and use generative AI to instantly generate optimized rewrites and uncover missing indexes. What you will see: Instant Optimization: How to automate query rewriting and get plain-language explanations of the logic changes.