
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
Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ...
Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...
Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...
Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...
The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...
The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...
In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...
AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.
The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...
