We're excited to announce that Security Event Manager (SEM) version 2026.2 is now available! You can access it through your Customer Portal or learn more at solarwinds.com.
In our previous release (2025.4), SEM introduced Multiple Dashboards in the web console, giving each user the flexibility to create, customize, and share views built around their use cases. With 2026.2, we're taking a bigger swing by bringing AI-powered detection to SEM and making compliance and security hardening easier out of the box.
Anomalous Detection with Platform Connect
This is the one we've been most excited to put in your hands. SEM 2026.2 introduces Anomaly Detection powered by Platform Connect - a secure, encrypted connection between your on-premises SEM Manager and the SolarWinds SaaS Platform. Once connected, SEM uses cloud-based machine-learning baselines to surface unusual activity automatically to save you from alert fatigue and reduce noise.
Anomaly Detection is built around a set of out-of-the-box detection use cases covering critical attack stages. Vertical Brute Force is available now. Beyond that, we're planning to deliver additional use cases out-of-band as development completes - so you'll get them automatically without waiting for the next major release. Other use cases on our radar, though not yet committed, include password spraying, port scanning, and ransomware/FIM among others.
A new Anomalous Events workflow lets you investigate suspicious patterns directly inside the SEM console, with an event-volume timeline and anomaly markers that pinpoint exactly when something looked off. Anomaly Detection setup and management is administrator-controlled, while other roles can view results once it's configured.
Anomalous Detection is available as a Technical Preview in this release and is included with SEM to help you get hands-on quickly. Learn more here.
Security Hardening Across the Board
This release tightens SEM's own security posture in several meaningful ways:
- Password & authentication enhancements - when you update your password, SEM now checks that it hasn't been used before, and the password encoding algorithm has been upgraded to a stronger standard. Existing users will be prompted for a one-time password change at next login.
- Concurrent session limiting - cap the number of simultaneous SEM UI sessions per user to reduce the risk of unauthorized access.
- Enforced default CMC password change - SEM now requires changing the default CMC password on first startup from the UI.
- Third-party license transparency - license information for third-party components is now included in both the SEM Agent installer and the Manager appliance/console.
Platform, Performance & Compatibility
- Nutanix Ready Validation for AOS/AHV 7.5 - full compatibility with the latest Nutanix environment.
- Faster partition archival/unarchival - a larger buffer size improves archive performance, addressing customer-reported slowness.
- Agent improvements - increased the maximum allowed heap size for agents.
- Latest JDK and OS updates - JDK updated to 17.0.19 (Microsoft Build of OpenJDK) for Manager and Agents, plus an updated Debian Bookworm base for ongoing maintenance and security fixes.
As always, 2026.2 also includes a range of fixed customer issues and security updates to improve stability and reliability.
Next Steps
- Want to see everything that's new? Check out the complete release notes for detailed information and upgrade instructions.
- Curious what's coming next? Explore our SEM roadmap to see what we're working on.
- New to SolarWinds Security Event Manager? Try it free today - it's simple to deploy, easy to use, and delivers powerful threat detection and response out of the box.
