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At our recent SolarWinds Day event, we launched the SolarWinds^® AI Agent—a new agentic AI experience that will appear first in SolarWinds Observability and then across our entire portfolio. Built according to our AI by Design framework, the release marks a shift in how the IT professionals we serve will work hand-in-hand with their tools to keep operations on track.

Tech Evangelist Chrystal Taylor has seen a few things in her career, so we’ve asked her to kick off this new series that tackles the issues that matter: What are the IT buzzwords that bug her the most, and how can we get past them to the really good stuff?

In today’s complex application ecosystems, understanding the impact of database performance on user experience is critical. Traditional monitoring tools often isolate application and database visibility, complicating root cause analysis. SolarWinds^® Observability SaaS integrates Application Performance Monitoring (APM) with Database Observability (DBO), providing comprehensive, end-to-end performance insights that enable teams to troubleshoot quickly and optimize effectively.

Partners play an essential role in bridging the gap between innovation and implementation, helping IT teams adopt new capabilities with confidence. Today, as organizations modernize their infrastructures, expand hybrid environments, and begin experimenting with new forms of AI, partner expertise is more crucial than ever.

If you’re here, you’re probably comparing Datadog competitors, maybe researching a Datadog alternative a colleague mentioned to you, or sanity-checking an alternative to Datadog you already had on your shortlist. You won’t be the first. This field guide breaks down the top Datadog alternatives in 2025 with plain-spoken overviews, where each tool fits i.e. observability, application performance management (APM) etc., and what pricing looks like.

It’s late, a critical service is down, and the war room is in chaos. Engineers are digging through logs and deployment histories, asking the same question: “What changed?” This isn’t just a hypothetical nightmare; it’s a scenario our engineers at SolarWinds knew we had to solve for ourselves.

Artificial intelligence is transforming how database teams diagnose and optimize performance. But there’s a pattern behind the most successful outcomes: AI accelerates clarity when it’s built on unified, trustworthy data. Where telemetry is fragmented, siloed, or incomplete, and workflows are reactive, even sophisticated models struggle to produce insights that teams can actually act on.

This is the second blog in a three-part series on the value of SolarWinds^® Observability. In the first part of this series, we explored the substantial return on investment (ROI) that comes from consolidating your monitoring tools into a single, unified observability platform. Cutting tool sprawl can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars annually by lowering software costs, reducing incidents, and slashing resolution times. But there’s a crucial piece of the puzzle we haven’t discussed yet: how you pay for it.

The recent government funding lapse has been resolved, and federal agencies are now operating under a Continuing Resolution (CR) that funds most agencies through January 30, 2026, at Fiscal Year 2024 spending levels. With the immediate crisis averted, federal IT leaders can shift their focus entirely from contingency planning back to mission assurance and operational efficiency.