As organizations grapple with increasingly complex cloud-native environments, SolarWinds returns to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 as a Gold Sponsor with a clear mission: help enterprises conquer the chaos of distributed microservices, Kubernetes clusters, and hybrid IT architectures. At Booth #630 in Hall B3, the company will showcase its full-stack observability platform built on an OpenTelemetry framework, demonstrating how unified visibility across diverse environments can cut through complexity and deliver actionable insights for IT teams managing dynamic, ephemeral workloads.
In this exclusive VMblog Q&A, Peter Di Stefano, Director of Product Marketing at SolarWinds, reveals how the company is addressing critical pain points facing KubeCon attendees—from troubleshooting performance issues in distributed microservices to managing alert fatigue and ensuring end-user satisfaction. With recent unveilings including an AI Agent for autonomous operational resilience, AI Root Cause Assist, and enhanced dynamic threshold alerting, SolarWinds is positioning itself at the intersection of observability and artificial intelligence. Di Stefano also shares insights on the company’s role as a top contributor to the CNCF, its acquisition of Squadcast to unify observability and incident response, and his vision for how AI agents and data fabric architectures will transform the cloud-native landscape through 2026 and beyond.
VMblog: Can you give us your elevator pitch? What key message will attendees hear from you at KubeCon NA 2025, and what actionable insights will they take back to influence their management teams?
Peter Di Stefano: At KubeCon NA 2025, SolarWinds empowers KubeCon attendees to conquer the chaos of cloud-native environments. We offer a unified observability platform that cuts through complexity, helping you troubleshoot performance issues in distributed microservices, understand Kubernetes cluster health, and manage persistent storage and databases with ease. SolarWinds provides the actionable insights you need to ensure end-user satisfaction and influence your management teams.”
VMblog: As a sponsor of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025, what sponsorship level have you chosen, and what strategic objectives drove this investment?
Peter Di Stefano: SolarWinds is a proud Gold Sponsor of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025. This conference remains the “who’s who” of attendees, speakers and sponsors.
VMblog: Where can attendees find you at the event? What hands-on demos, interactive experiences, or booth activities have you designed to showcase your technology?
Peter Di Stefano: SolarWinds will be in Booth #1630, Hall B3. LIVE demos available each day from our experts Sr. Solution Bradley Sisson and Solution Architect Kevin Miele. Be sure to attend our scheduled demo in our booth #1630 on November 12 at 1:15pm. This is an insider’s sneak peek into our latest AI-powered innovations which will transform the way IT teams manage and optimize their environments
VMblog: How has your company’s KubeCon presence evolved since your first participation? What value keeps driving your continued investment in this community
Peter Di Stefano: Although it is just our second year as a sponsor, we’ve been a top contributor to the CNSF for much longer. We were so impressed with the conference in 2024 that we returned in 2025 with an upgraded sponsorship so we can continue to spread the good word about SolarWinds.
VMblog: Can you dive deeper into your company’s core technologies? What specific challenges do you solve for KubeCon attendees in their day-to-day operations?
Peter Di Stefano: In October of 2022 we released a new SaaS platform built from the ground up with an OpenTelemetry framework. SolarWinds Observability SaaS is a full-stack tightly integrated, AI-powered observability platform. KubeCon attendees are often grappling with the complexities of managing highly dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral environments. SolarWinds technologies address several key pain points:
- Lack of Unified Visibility Across Cloud-Native Stacks
- Troubleshooting Performance Issues in Distributed Microservices
- Understanding Kubernetes Cluster Health and Resource Utilization
- Managing and Monitoring Persistent Storage and Databases in Cloud-Native
- Alert Fatigue and Inefficient Incident Response
- Ensuring End-User Experience and Application Availability
VMblog: In an increasingly saturated cloud-native marketplace, what distinguishes your solution in late 2025? What’s your unique value proposition?
Peter Di Stefano: Our unique value proposition lies in its ability to offer simple, powerful, and secure full-stack observability, along with AI-assisted remediation, across diverse and complex hybrid IT environments.
SolarWinds Observability distinguishes itself in the cloud-native marketplace through several key factors and a unique value proposition.
- Comprehensive Hybrid IT Observability – Self-Hosted and SaaS full-stack offerings
- AI-Powered Insights and Automation from statistical implemented AI to Machine Learning, Generative AI, and now Agentic AI.
- Flexible Deployment Options – Flex SKU and Platform Connect make it easy, financially and technically, to move from on-prem to the cloud.
- End-to-End Digital Experience Management
VMblog: With GenAI workloads and LLM deployments reshaping cloud-native architectures, how does your solution address these AI infrastructure demands?
Peter Di Stefano: As I briefly mentioned earlier, SolarWinds Observability addresses AI infrastructure demands, including GenAI workloads and LLM deployments, by leveraging AI and machine learning, and soon to be Agentic AI agents within its platform. This allows for enhanced operations and proactive issue resolution in cloud-native and hybrid environments.
- Proactive Anomaly Detection
- Accelerated Issue Detection and Root Cause Analysis
- Capacity Planning and Resource Optimization
- Intelligent Alerting
- Generative AI Query Assist
- Improved Digital Experience
VMblog: Is your company presenting any sessions, workshops, or contributing to the event programming? What key takeaways will attendees gain from your presentations?
Peter Di Stefano: While we aren’t presenting, we will have our best and brightest Solarians in our Booth #630. Take a moment to meet Dan Hauenstein, VP Product Management, on the latest and greatest developments with our products, advances in AI, including our Agentic AI agents.
VMblog: What’s your executive pitch for CTOs and CIOs? How do you demonstrate measurable business impact and ROI?
Peter Di Stefano: CTOs and CIOs today face immense pressure to accelerate digital transformation while ensuring the stability, performance, and security of increasingly complex cloud-native and hybrid IT environments. SolarWinds Observability is not just another monitoring solution; it’s a strategic platform designed to empower their teams, reduce operational costs, and directly contribute to their organization’s bottom line.
SolarWinds Observability delivers tangible business impact and a clear return on investment through several key areas:
- Reduced Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and Minimized Downtime
- Optimized Resource Utilization and Cost Savings
- Enhanced Operational Efficiency and Team Productivity
- Improved End-User Experience and Customer Satisfaction
- Accelerated Digital Transformation and Innovation
In summary, SolarWinds Observability empowers your organization to achieve operational excellence, reduce costs, and accelerate innovation, providing a clear and measurable return on your investment in the dynamic cloud-native landscape of late 2025.
VMblog: Can you outline a typical customer implementation journey? What critical pain points do you resolve, and what outcomes do clients achieve?
Peter Di Stefano: Here’s an outline of a typical SolarWinds Observability customer implementation journey, the critical pain points resolved, and the outcomes clients achieve:
Typical SolarWinds Observability Customer Implementation Journey:
- Initial Assessment and Planning:
- Goal: Define the scope of implementation, identify critical applications and services to monitor, and establish success metrics.
- Deployment and Data Ingestion:
- Goal: Establish a unified data pipeline for comprehensive telemetry collection across the entire IT stack.
- Configuration and Customization:
- Goal: Create a personalized observability experience that provides relevant insights to the right stakeholders.
- Optimization and Advanced Features Adoption:
- Goal: Continuously refine observability practices, automate incident management, and enhance proactive issue resolution.
- Continuous Improvement and Expansion:
- Goal: Achieve a state of continuous operational resilience and leverage observability as a strategic asset for digital transformation.
Critical Pain Points Resolved:
SolarWinds Observability directly addresses several critical pain points discussed earlier that organizations face in managing complex IT environments, particularly those adopting cloud-native architectures and AI workloads:
By resolving these pain points, SolarWinds Observability empowers clients to achieve significant positive outcomes and measurable business impact:
- Comprehensive Observability
- Faster Troubleshooting and Reduced Downtime
- Optimized Resource Utilization and Cost Savings
- Enhanced Operational Efficiency and Productivity
- Improved Digital Experience and Customer Satisfaction
- Proactive Incident Response
- Confident AI/ML Operations
- Accelerated Digital Transformation
VMblog: How does your technology fit within the broader CNCF ecosystem? What’s your role in the modern cloud-native infrastructure stack?
Peter Di Stefano: SolarWinds Observability plays a significant role in the modern cloud-native infrastructure stack by providing comprehensive, unified observability across diverse environments, including cloud-native, on-premises, and hybrid setups. This is crucial for organizations managing complex, distributed systems, which are common in the CNCF ecosystem. SolarWinds has consistently been a top 25 contributor to the CNCF, primarily through the work contributed to OpenTelemetry.
SolarWinds’ technology fits within the broader CNCF ecosystem by:
- Leveraging CNCF Projects: SolarWinds utilizes and integrates with CNCF graduated projects. For example, SolarWinds uses in-toto, a software supply chain security framework that has achieved the highest CNCF maturity level. This integration helps ensure the trust and integrity of how software is built and delivered, addressing a critical need in the cloud-native ecosystem.
- Providing Unified Visibility: In a landscape often characterized by tool sprawl and data silos, SolarWinds Observability offers a single pane of glass for monitoring infrastructure performance across various components, including containers and Kubernetes. This simplifies issue identification, troubleshooting, and performance optimization in dynamic cloud-native environments.
- Addressing Hybrid IT Complexity: Many organizations operate with a mix of self-hosted, hybrid, cloud, and multi-cloud deployments. SolarWinds Observability provides holistic performance monitoring for these diverse environments, which is essential for effective management and meeting SLAs.
- Enhancing Operational Intelligence with AI: SolarWinds Observability incorporates AIOps and machine learning to provide AI-enhanced insights, prioritize real problems, and reduce alert fatigue. This intelligent approach helps accelerate issue resolution and improve efficiency in the fast-evolving cloud-native landscape.
In the modern cloud-native infrastructure stack, SolarWinds’ role is to simplify the management and monitoring of complex, distributed systems.
VMblog: Are you unveiling any new products, features, or partnerships at KubeCon NA? What exclusive announcements can attendees expect? (If you cannot speak to futures, rephrase and answer as “Have you recently unveiled any new products, features, or partnerships that you can discuss).
Peter Di Stefano: SolarWinds has recently unveiled several new products, features, and partnerships that are relevant to cloud-native architectures and AI infrastructure. While I cannot speak to specific announcements at KubeCon in November, here are some recent developments:
- AI Agent and Expanded AI Capabilities: SolarWinds launched an AI Agent and expanded its AI capabilities to advance autonomous operational resilience (October 8, 2025). This includes:
- Introducing SolarWinds AI Agent (Tech Preview): This agent provides direct in-product chat, Teams, or Slack assistance for tasks like running custom reports, setting up new systems monitoring, or triaging critical alerts.
- SolarWinds AI Root Cause Assist: This feature helps technicians identify the most likely source of an issue, accelerating mean time to remediation (MTTR).
- SolarWinds AI Dynamic Threshold Alert Enhancements: These enhancements reduce alert fatigue by learning system behavior and only triggering alerts for deviations from expected patterns.
- Next-Generation Solutions: SolarWinds unveiled next-generation solutions to tackle modern IT operational resiliency challenges (April 2, 2025).
- Acquisition of Squadcast: SolarWinds acquired Squadcast, unifying observability and incident response (March 3, 2025).
These recent unveilings demonstrate SolarWinds’ commitment to addressing the evolving needs of cloud-native environments, particularly with the increasing demands of GenAI workloads and LLM deployments.
VMblog: What are the biggest obstacles to Kubernetes adoption and scaling in 2025? How does your solution help organizations overcome these barriers?
Peter Di Stefano: One of the biggest obstacles to Kubernetes adoption is the lack of skills in understanding Kubernetes Cluster Health and resource utilization. Ensuring that Kubernetes clusters are healthy, nodes are not overutilized, and pods have sufficient resources is crucial for both application performance and cost efficiency. However, achieving this efficiently can be difficult, leading to resource waste or performance bottlenecks.
SolarWinds Observability provides detailed metrics on Kubernetes cluster components (nodes, pods, deployments, services) and resource utilization (CPU, memory). AI models forecast capacity issues and recommend proactive optimizations.
- Benefit:This helps organizations proactively identify resource bottlenecks, scaling issues, and potential failures, leading to efficient resource allocation and cost savings.
VMblog: With platform engineering gaining momentum, how do you support organizations building internal developer platforms and improving developer experience?
Peter Di Stefano: SolarWinds Observability supports organizations building internal developer platforms and improving developer experience by providing a unified, AI-powered platform that addresses key challenges in cloud-native and hybrid IT environments. Here’s how:
- Unified Visibility for Platform Teams:
- Challenge: Platform engineering aims to provide developers with a seamless experience by abstracting away infrastructure complexity. A lack of unified visibility across diverse cloud environments, multiple Kubernetes clusters, microservices, and traditional infrastructure makes it difficult for platform teams to build and maintain robust platforms.
- SolarWinds Solution: SolarWinds Observability offers a “single pane of glass” that ingests and correlates metrics, traces, and logs from all these disparate sources. This unified view allows platform teams to understand the health and performance of their underlying infrastructure and services, ensuring the stability of the internal developer platform.
- Accelerated Troubleshooting and Reduced Cognitive Load for Developers:
- Challenge: Developers often face “troubleshooting performance issues in distributed microservices” and “alert fatigue” when working with complex cloud-native applications. This increases their cognitive load and slows down development cycles.
- SolarWinds Solution: Distributed tracing and advanced log management capabilities (part of SolarWinds Observability/AppOptics and Loggly) enable rapid root cause analysis. This means developers can quickly pinpoint the source of latency or errors, reducing their mean time to resolution (MTTR). Intelligent alerting with anomaly detection reduces noise, allowing developers to focus on critical issues. The Generative AI Query Assist feature, powered by large language models, further improves developer experience by allowing them to interact with complex observability data using natural language, accelerating troubleshooting and improving accessibility.
- Optimized Resource Utilization for Efficient Platform Operations:
- Challenge: Ensuring Kubernetes clusters are healthy, nodes are not over-utilized, and pods have sufficient resources is crucial for application performance and cost efficiency within an internal developer platform.
- SolarWinds Solution: SolarWinds Observability provides detailed metrics on Kubernetes cluster components and resource utilization. AI models forecast capacity issues and recommend proactive optimizations, helping platform teams prevent over-provisioning, control SaaS costs, and ensure the efficient operation of the platform.
- Proactive Incident Response and Streamlined Workflows:
- Challenge: Inefficient incident response and high volumes of alerts can disrupt developer workflows and impact the reliability of the internal platform.
- SolarWinds Solution: Intelligent alerting with anomaly detection reduces alert fatigue. Integration with SolarWinds Service Desk can automate incident creation and routing, ensuring that identified issues are promptly addressed by the right teams. This shift from reactive to proactive issue resolution contributes to a more stable and reliable developer platform.
- Confident AI/ML Operations for Advanced Platforms:
- Challenge: With the rise of GenAI workloads and LLM deployments, platform teams need to manage the unique performance and resource requirements of these AI infrastructures.
- SolarWinds Solution: SolarWinds Observability provides AI-powered insights, capacity planning, and specialized query tools to effectively monitor and manage GenAI workloads and LLM deployments. This ensures optimal performance and cost control for AI initiatives, enabling platform teams to confidently integrate advanced AI capabilities into their internal developer platforms.
By providing comprehensive observability, AI-driven insights, and streamlined operational workflows, SolarWinds Observability empowers organizations to build robust, efficient, and developer-friendly internal platforms, ultimately improving developer experience and accelerating digital transformation.
VMblog: Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, how do you see the cloud-native landscape transforming? What should enterprises be strategically planning for?
Peter Di Stefano: Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, the cloud-native landscape is expected to undergo significant transformations, primarily driven by the pervasive integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the evolving demands for operational efficiency and resilience. Enterprises should strategically plan for the following shifts:
Cloud-Native Landscape Transformation:
- AI as the Operating System of Business: AI will transition from experimental phases to become a fundamental part to business operations, much like PCs or email. Every employee will interact daily with AI co-pilots, agents, or generative assistants.
- Rise of “Frontier Firms” and AI Agents: A widening gap will emerge between companies that embed AI into their organizational DNA and those that don’t. “Frontier firms” will blend human capabilities with automation and AI agents to boost productivity and scale faster. AI agents, capable of performing complex tasks autonomously, will become embedded in daily workflows across various departments.
- Data Fabric and Real-time Insights: Data will remain the fuel for AI, and companies that can transform fragmented information into a unified “data fabric” will achieve better outcomes. The era of static dashboards is ending, with intelligent, streaming data systems becoming standard for real-time insights and AI reasoning.
- Multiagent Systems and Domain-Specific Language Models (DSLMs): Organizations will orchestrate emerging technologies such as multiagent systems, DSLMs, and physical AI to unlock new sources of business value.
- Kubernetes as a Strategic Platform: Kubernetes will continue to evolve from a container orchestrator into a strategic platform for modern IT, indispensable for hybrid cloud, GitOps, and AI/ML workloads.
- GenAI and AI Agent Impact on Productivity Tools: Through 2027, GenAI and AI agent use will significantly challenge mainstream productivity tools, prompting a market shakeup. This will lead to changes in the cost and packaging of everyday GenAI, with vendors potentially moving fee-based features into no-cost tiers.
- Verifiable Operational Data as Currency: Verifiable operational data will become a crucial currency, fueling a data feed economy where digital trust frameworks and verifiability are prerequisites.
