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The emergence of a transformative technology never fails to spark a frenzy of excitement, and agentic AI is no exception. However, as vendors rush to position themselves as “agentic-ready” and customers seek a solution to deeply rooted challenges, a fog of hype can make it difficult to discern what’s truly valuable.

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 2026 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.

This post looks at what stood out at SQL Bits 2025 and why it matters for today’s database teams.

It focuses on the key themes, practical takeaways, and broader conversations from the event, giving readers a clear sense of what was discussed and what they should pay attention to next.