Engineering AI Systems for Autonomy and Resilience with Krishna Sai

Enterprise IT systems have grown into sprawling, highly distributed environments spanning cloud infrastructure, applications, data platforms, and increasingly AI driven workloads. Observability tools have made it easier to collect metrics, logs, and traces, but understanding why systems fail and responding quickly remains a persistent challenge. As complexity continues to rise, the industry is looking beyond dashboards and alerts towards agentic AI systems that can reason about operational data, reduce toil, and take action when things go wrong. SolarWinds offers solutions to monitor, understand, and remediate issues across complex distributed systems. The company began as a leader in network and infrastructure monitoring, and has evolved to support modern applications, cloud environments, containers, and AI workloads with a growing focus on reducing operational toil. Krishna Sai is the chief technology officer at SolarWinds. He joins the show with Sean Falconer to discuss how SolarWinds is rethinking observability in the age of AI, what it means to design agentic systems for mission critical environments, how AI assisted programming is reshaping engineering workflows, and why the future of operations depends on building platforms where humans and autonomous agents work together. This episode is hosted by Sean Falconer. Check the show notes for more information on Sean's work and where to find him. Sai, welcome to the show. Thanks, Sean. It's great to see you and me too. Big fan of the show, so thanks for having me here. Oh, well, thank you so much. That's nice to hear. Yeah. I'm looking forward to this as well. So I wanted to start off talking a little bit about, you know, SolarWinds and kind of set the stage there because I think a lot of people know SolarWinds. Maybe it's, like, a single tool that they used, you know, years ago, but you guys do a lot of different things. So given where you are today, like, how would you describe what SolarWinds actually is today to someone who hasn't looked at the space in a while? No. Absolutely. If you take a step back and say how IT and ops teams who typically use Solovance products have been using Solovance for the past, like, twenty five years or so, you know, our product portfolio broadly expands three domains, observability, incidence response and service management. And to put it simply, IT and ops teams use us to help detect and remediate issues across a variety of workloads and environments, Network and infrastructure, which is where we started and have been a leader for a very long time, but also applications, databases, containers, ML workloads, etcetera. And so our solutions cover this from a horizontal perspective, meaning give you the ability to look at the general basic health of the typical workloads, compute, storage, network, etcetera, but also vertical cross cutting concerns like performance, reliability, you know, cost, security, and so on. Right? And what happens is typically, IT and ops teams are accountable for SLAs and SLOs. Right? Like and that kinda drives your day to …