Hello everyone! 😊
Welcome to the SolarWinds® Incident Response space here on THWACK®. This community is designed to be your go-to hub for everything related to Incident Response. Whether you are getting started with on-call management, looking to reduce alert noise, or exploring better ways to swarm and resolve critical incidents, you are in the right place.
After SolarWinds acquired Squadcast® in 2025, we began the journey of bringing incident response fully into the SolarWinds ecosystem. Last year marked our first step with the branding transition to Incident Response by Squadcast. Today, we are excited to officially move forward as SolarWinds Incident Response, signaling a stronger connection to the SolarWinds portfolio.
Now, let’s talk shop. Before we share what’s coming in 2026, it’s worth looking back at the foundation we built in 2025. This past year, we focused on unifying SolarWinds Incident Response within the SolarWinds product ecosystem.
Here’s a 2025 rewind:
Strengthening Integrations Across the SolarWinds Portfolio
To ensure your IT systems work better together, we embedded SolarWinds Incident Response more deeply into the SolarWinds tools your teams already rely on every day.
Here’s how:
- SolarWinds Observability (SaaS and Self-Hosted): Alert source integrations ensure alerts flow seamlessly from SolarWinds Observability into incident response, allowing teams to move smoothly from detection to resolution without losing context, which reduces manual handoffs and ensures the right information reaches the right teams instantly
- SolarWinds Service Desk: Tickets from SolarWinds Service Desk can now be routed directly to SolarWinds Incident Response as incidents, keeping tickets and incidents aligned across systems and allowing IT and operations (Ops) teams to stay coordinated without switching platforms
Enterprise-Grade Security and Compliance
Security and compliance remained a top priority throughout 2025. As part of this effort, we completed our Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 external audit and achieved official certification.
This milestone provides enterprise customers with trusted third-party validation that their incident data is handled with the highest standards of security, availability, and confidentiality. It also makes SolarWinds Incident Response easier to deploy in regulated and security-conscious environments.
Built for Automation at Scale
SolarWinds Incident Response is designed to be highly extensible, with more than 200 native integrations, publicly available APIs, and Terraform® support. In 2025, we further expanded this extensibility to better support growing and complex environments.
These enhancements enable teams to:
- Use public REST APIs for schedules, incident actions, and audit logs to automate operational workflows
- Rely on a Default System User to manage entity dependencies more reliably
- Integrate SolarWinds Incident Response more deeply into infrastructure-as-code pipelines through Terraform provider v2.5.0 enhancements
Together, these updates allow IT and operations teams to automate the full incident life cycle, from on-call management to compliance tracking, while fitting cleanly into continuous integration/continuous delivery workflows.
Streamlining Migration Efforts
To simplify adoption, we focused on making migrations faster and less disruptive. With the release of our open-source Opsgenie Migrator Tool, teams can now:
- Migrate users, teams, schedules, and Terraform workflows with minimal effort
- Preserve years of complex configuration data while switching to SolarWinds Incident Response
This self-serve approach removes the traditional migration tax and accelerates time to value.
A More Human On-Call Mobile Experience
Being on call is demanding, and mobile experiences matter most when engineers are under pressure. To improve day-to-day usability, we introduced:
- Dark Mode to reduce eye strain during long shifts
- Custom alert volume controls to ensure critical notifications are not missed
- In-app updates and clearer visibility into notification permissions
- Manual activity logging directly from the mobile app
These updates prioritize making on-call workflows less cumbersome for engineers. They help responders stay reachable at 2 a.m. without burnout and document actions easily from the field.
Improving Core Incident Management and Analytics
We continued refining the core incident management experience. These quality-of-life enhancements translate directly into lower mean time to repair. They reduce alert noise for engineers, improve visibility for managers, and help teams resolve incidents faster and with less fatigue.
Key enhancements include:
- Improved collaboration through enhanced incident notes, summaries, and actions
- Stronger noise reduction through the ability to merge multiple incidents into a single umbrella Incident across web, Slack®, and Microsoft Teams®
- Better on-call experience with enhanced calendar exports, live call recording playback, and custom voice greetings
- Improved stakeholder communication through enhanced status page subscriber management
We've rolled out a brand-new analytics experience to give you deeper visibility into your incidents, response times, and alert noise reduction.
What’s new:
- Noise Reduction & Transient Alert Metrics
- Aggregation options for TTA and TTR - Mean, Median, 75th Percentile, 90th Percentile, 99h Percentile
- Group Incident Metrics by Priority & Status
- An Updated UI for improved user experience and focus on key insights
- Improved performance and reliability
- Get clear visibility into each engineer’s on-call workload with the new On-Call Hours per user chart. Use it to monitor team load distribution and support on-call compensation calculations.
We also rolled out several UI and UX enhancements to make using SolarWinds Incident Response more intuitive and enjoyable. But the work didn’t stop there. Our product and engineering teams made major behind-the-scenes investments in scalability, security, reliability, and capacity planning.
January 2026 Releases
As we kick off 2026, below is a snapshot of what we’ve shipped so far in January.
SolarWinds Incident Response Trial Now Available in SolarWinds Observability SaaS
As part of our continued effort to fully integrate SolarWinds Incident Response into the SolarWinds product suite, we’re excited to announce the official launch of a 30-day free trial within SolarWinds Observability SaaS.
Getting started is quick and easy. If you’re an Admin or Account Owner on SolarWinds Observability SaaS, you’ll now see an “Try Incident Response” option at the bottom of the navigation bar. With just one click, an automated provisioning process spins up your environment and puts you in the driver’s seat within seconds.
Even better, the trial includes access to our most powerful tier with Enterprise level features, for the full 30 days.
We’re excited for you to explore these new enhancements. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below, and we’ll be happy to help. 😊
