Chances are you’ve been using SolarWinds for a long time. You’ve built groups, custom properties, custom pollers, alerts, dashboards…”, but you feel a little bit stuck and don’t know how to get more value from your investment.
Now the question is: How can we leverage the new AI models and the agentic AI framework to continue our journey to autonomous networks?
IBM Network Intelligence connects to your SolarWinds platform, ingests metrics, alerts, topology and configs, and uses network-native AI models to work out where the issues are how to fix them - autonomously.
Turbocharge SolarWinds with AI
Let’s look at the three big ways IBM Network Intelligence supercharges your SolarWinds platform.
From SolarWinds to IBM Network Intelligence
Detect anomalies without alert policies
The dirty secret of most observability platforms: the health of the system is directly proportional to the amount of time humans spend tuning alerts. Forgot to create an alert policy for that new KPI? SolarWinds won’t alert you. Maybe you didn’t even know that the KPI even existed – so how would you know you had to create an alert policy for it?
IBM Network Intelligence takes a different approach. It uses network‑native AI models pretrained on network domains and fine-tuned with your own data.
Instead of “if interface utilisation > 80% for 5 minutes, alert”, it learns the structural behaviour of every single KPI and creates observations every time there is an anomaly. No need to create policies, all automatic.
This matters for two reasons:
- Stop wasting time on tuning rules for every new link, site or application.
- Catch issues that no one ever bothered to write a rule for, because they weren’t obvious until they happened.
IBM Network Intelligence detects anomalies in the behaviour of every single KPI without alert policies
Agentic Network Operations: Autonomous Investigations
SolarWinds is only useful if you can act on it. This is when agentic NetOps comes in.
Instead of spending hours and hours trying to understand where the issues are (and how to fix them), IBM Network Intelligence runs autonomous investigations.
Think of it as going from:
200 alerts that all say “something somewhere is unhappy”. Still, you can’t find any real issue.
…to
An autonomous investigation that says “core WAN path between Site A and DC1 is behaving abnormally since 09:12, coinciding with a config change and a shift in traffic patterns. Change MTU from 1500 to 1492 on interface Gi0/0/0 on RTREDGE1 to fix the problem. These are the commands to apply the change….”
IBM Network Intelligence launches autonomous investigations:
- Groups related observations into a single investigation
- Creates hypotheses autonomously and gathers live context from the network to validate or discard them
- Reasons through the data and keeps adding steps to the investigation until it validates whether the issues were a false alert or comes back with a resolution plan
You still stay in control, but the grunt work of correlation and triage is handled for you.
IBM Network Intelligence creates autonomous investigations to find the root cause of the problem and provide a remediation plan
Detailed step by step guide on how to solve the problem
Unify your tools
NetOps today isn’t short of tools, it’s short of time. For any non-trivial issue, engineers end up doing the same dance:
- Go to ServiceNow to check active incidents
- Open SolarWinds to see which devices and interfaces are red
- Jump into NTA to work out who is talking to whom on those links
- Check NCM to see if someone “just changed something”
- Look in NetBox for what that device actually is, where it lives, and what it connects to
- Use Forward Networks to understand what the path is supposed to look like
- Maybe dive into NETSCOUT for packet‑level truth
IBM Network Intelligence autonomously talks with multiple tools to investigate and solve the issue
Each tool has a piece of the puzzle, but the reasoning lives in the engineer’s head. IBM Network Intelligence connects these tools together into a single autonomous reasoning layer, so the system does the first round of thinking for you.
SolarWinds stays at the centre of your monitoring stack; IBM Network Intelligence turns that stack into something that can autonomously watch, understand and act across tools, not just alert in isolation.