SolarWinds launches Avior AI for controlled IT operations

SolarWinds has launched Avior, an agentic artificial intelligence system for IT operations aimed at mission-critical enterprise environments.

Avior is a standalone application built on the SolarWinds platform to automate routine IT work across hybrid and on-premises systems. It uses goal-based agents to carry out defined tasks across different parts of an organisation's technology estate, while requiring human approval for higher-risk actions.

The product enters a market where technology suppliers are trying to move artificial intelligence in IT operations beyond chat-based assistants and into software that can act with limited autonomy. SolarWinds is positioning Avior around operational tasks such as incident handling, compliance checks, configuration management and capacity monitoring.

According to SolarWinds, Avior can group related alerts into a single incident, audit devices against policy baselines, detect and correct configuration drift, back up running configurations, track utilisation and spending, and manage asset records, including firmware versions and end-of-life exposure.

Control framework

SolarWinds said the system uses what it describes as risk-tiered autonomy, meaning actions considered potentially dangerous require explicit approval from a human operator. The product also includes audit trails, goal tracking, rollback support, data masking and least-privilege access controls.

The company is trying to address a central concern for IT teams adopting AI tools in sensitive environments: whether software can act without creating additional security, compliance or availability risks. Avior is presented as a deterministic system intended to deliver more controlled and repeatable execution than conventional AI assistants.

That approach reflects broader pressure on corporate IT departments to reduce outages, manage increasingly complex estates and handle operational workloads with limited staff time. Suppliers across observability, incident response and IT service management have been adding AI functions, but many enterprise buyers remain cautious about giving autonomous software direct control of production systems.

Avior can work across SolarWinds products as well as third-party integrations. Customers do not need to migrate their data or systems to use the product, and it is intended to operate in both self-hosted and software-as-a-service environments.

On data handling, SolarWinds said only data relevant to a request is sent, and only data the user is already permitted to access. Customer data is masked and not used to train underlying models.

Executive comments

Krishna Sai, Chief Technology Officer at SolarWinds, outlined the company's view of how AI in IT operations is evolving.

"When AI exists in mission-critical IT work, enterprises need this technology to graduate from virtual assistant to trusted teammate," said Krishna Sai, Chief Technology Officer at SolarWinds.

"Avior grounds probabilistic models in deterministic execution, so operators stay in control of high-risk decisions. That is how IT shifts from managing alerts to orchestrating resilient, goal-driven operations.

"This goes beyond model access. It is operational context and governed execution. Twenty-five years of understanding how these environments actually behave is encoded in the goals, skills and tools inside Avior," Sai added.

Cullen Childress, Interim Chief Executive Officer and Chief Product Officer at SolarWinds, linked the launch to the operational demands facing IT teams.

"IT operations have long been measured by how quickly teams can respond," said Cullen Childress, Interim Chief Executive Officer and Chief Product Officer at SolarWinds.

"But as environments become more complex, distributed and noisy, reaction time alone is no longer enough. Organisations need to move proactively, reduce operational risk and build resilience into the way IT work gets done. Avior was designed to meet this moment, helping teams shift from managing alerts to orchestrating outcomes with clear goals, guardrails and control," Childress said.

The launch adds to SolarWinds' effort to expand beyond monitoring and management software into AI-led operational tooling. Avior is being offered through a guided onboarding programme.