
SolarWinds announced SolarWinds Virtual Classrooms, a free virtual learning experience for eligible IT professionals that have purchased SolarWinds product maintenance.
In virtual classrooms, SolarWinds product experts will host live, interactive training sessions designed to help IT pros harness the power of their SolarWinds deployments to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently as infrastructure complexity and skillset demands on IT pros increase.
“Our philosophy has always been to ensure that our products are fast to get up and running, easy to use, and affordable. Unlike the ‘Big Four’ IT management vendors, we’ve never required professional services or training with our products,” said Chris LaPoint, VP Product Management, SolarWinds. “By offering this alternative to expensive professional services included with our standard maintenance, we’re raising the bar on our competitors’ value and answering the need our customers have expressed for comprehensive, relevant IT management training.”
SolarWinds Virtual Classrooms allows SolarWinds experts to share their expertise and knowledge with fellow IT pros tackling everyday IT challenges. Each session will be scheduled at varying times to assist customers in multiple time zones and will include lecture and lab segments in a small, virtual classroom setting, allowing IT pros to apply their training within their own environments.
To kick off the program, SolarWinds will offer a series of virtual classroom sessions on SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, the company’s flagship network performance monitoring and management solution.
IT pros who attend these sessions will:
- Get hands-on guidance for customization and daily use
- Learn how to create and manage custom alerts and alter suppression, device dependencies, and custom properties
- Gain a good understanding of MIBs, OIDs, and SNMP and learn how to create a customized monitoring environment
- Acquire the ability to fine-tune equipment to optimize its capabilities, tuning polling intervals to capture data, and adding additional pollers for load balancing and better network visibility
In preparation for the virtual classroom, SolarWinds worked with over 500 IT pros to develop and refine the course curriculum. The program complements SolarWinds’ effective, accessible and easy-to-use product characteristics to ensure that every customer is getting the most out of their products.
The company plans to scale SolarWinds Virtual Classrooms to include additional products, the latest IT challenges and a more frequent class schedule throughout 2014 in accommodation of the continued overwhelming demand for training.
The Latest
For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...
I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...
Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...
80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...
40% of organizations deploying AI will implement dedicated AI observability tools by 2028 to monitor model performance, bias and outputs, according to Gartner ...
Until AI-powered engineering tools have live visibility of how code behaves at runtime, they cannot be trusted to autonomously ensure reliable systems, according to the State of AI-Powered Engineering Report 2026 report from Lightrun. The report reveals that a major volume of manual work is required when AI-generated code is deployed: 43% of AI-generated code requires manual debugging in production, even after passing QA or staging tests. Furthermore, an average of three manual redeploy cycles are required to verify a single AI-suggested code fix in production ...
Many organizations describe AI as strategic, but they do not manage it strategically. When AI plans are disconnected from strategy, detached from organizational learning, and protected from serious assumptions testing, the problem is no longer technical immaturity; it is a failure of management discipline ... Executives too often tell organizations to "use AI" before they define what AI is supposed to change. The problem deepens in organizations where strategy isn't well articulated in the first place ...
Across the enterprise technology landscape, a quiet crisis is playing out. Organizations have run hundreds, sometimes thousands, of generative AI pilots. Leadership has celebrated the proof of concept (POCs) ... Industry experience points to a sobering reality: only 5-10% of AI POCs that progress to the pilot stage successfully reach scaled production. The remaining 90% fail because the enterprise environment around them was never ready to absorb them, not the AI models ...
Today's modern systems are not what they once were. Organizations now rely on distributed systems, event-driven workflows, hybrid and multi-cloud environments and continuous delivery pipelines. While each adds flexibility, it also introduces new, often invisible failures. Development speed is no longer the primary bottleneck of innovation. Reliability is ...
Seeing is believing, or in this case, seeing is understanding, according to New Relic's 2025 Observability Forecast for Retail and eCommerce report. Retailers who want to provide exceptional customer experiences while improving IT operations efficiency are leaning on observability ... Here are five key takeaways from the report ...
