We’re excited to announce a release candidate (RC) for version 2026.4 of the SolarWinds® Platform, SolarWinds® Observability Self-Hosted, and the Orion Network and Systems modules. Version 2026.4 RC is now available for all customers under maintenance, so log in to your customer portal to download it. Want to see everything new? Check out the Release Notes.
Here is a quick list of the major features, grouped by product and area, followed by more details for some of them.
Observability Self-Hosted Exclusives
- SW1, the SolarWinds AI Agent: A major step forward:
- AI-generated modern dashboards: describe what you want and let SW1 build it
- SW1 for Network Configurations: AI assistance for network configuration
- SW1 for Log Analysis: On demand analysis of logs
- OSH MCP Server for online environments
- SW1 Automatic Updates: Adds new capabilities when available (upcoming Custom Properties, Groups, SWQL generation, Alert Root Cause Analysis)
- Role-based access controls (RBAC) for the AI Agent
- Expanded Cloud Monitoring & Cost Management:
- Cloud cost dashboard now support custom time-range filtering for AWS, Azure, and GCP
- GCP Cloud Router (Partner Interconnect) and Azure ExpressRoute peering
- Leverage AWS Organization accounts to monitor your environment
- Cloud polling can be reassigned to Additional Polling Engines
- Anomaly-Based Alerting (ABA) now covers cloud VMs
- Security Observability enhancements:
- Ansible-driven patch remediation
- 2026.4 risk-score improvements
- High Availability enhancements
Observability Self-Hosted, Network, and Infrastructure Modules
- Traffic Path Analysis: Visualizing Network Traffic and Flow Connections
- Load balancers: Support for F5 VELOS and F5 R-Series (SNMP)
- Switches: Support for Ruckus stack topology, hardware health, and VLANs
- SD-WAN: Versa Networks support and improvements to Cisco Catalyst vEdge
- Configuration: Config: Stacked switch firmware upgrades (Cisco 9000)
- SAM API Poller: Template based assignment
- Storage: Updated Pure Storage polling using latest API
- Virtualization: Nutanix polling migrated to the v4 API
- IPAM: AWS VPC IP management support in IPAM and UI improvements
- Agents: Improved support for High Availability pools
- DPA: Connect cloud-hosted databases to DPA via DPAIM
SolarWinds Platform (available to all products)
- Maintenance Windows: new SLA Mute mode
- Discovery: Modernized Network Discovery experience
- Engine Load Balancing extended to WMI/WinRM
- SDK/API: API Token and OAuth authentication
- Accessibility: Improvements to 508 compliance
- gMSA and EntraID support for MSSQL repository
- Licensing: a grace period on deactivation for offline customers
- Alerting: Asset ID included in forwarded alerts (ServiceNow / Service Desk / Incident Response)
- And more…
SW1, the SolarWinds AI Agent
2026.4 is our most significant AI release yet. SW1 moves beyond answering questions to actively helping you build, configure, and troubleshoot your environment.
AI-generated modern dashboards: You can now ask SW1 to create a modern dashboard in natural language—describe the entities, metrics, and layout you care about, and the agent assembles it for you. This dramatically lowers the effort of standing up new views and helps teams standardize on modern dashboards faster.
SW1 for Network Configurations: analyze config changes in context, score change severity, flag risky/less-secure changes, and recommend vendor-aligned, STIG/CVE-compliant remediation snippets.
SW1 for Log Analysis: Adds on-demand, AI-assisted analysis to the Logs widget on Node Details, returning a summary, potential root-cause guidance, recommended actions, and prevention measures in the SW1 panel.
OSH MCP Server for online environments: 2026.4 introduces the OSH Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for connected deployments, opening OSH data to AI-driven workflows.
Role-based access controls for SW1: New RBAC controls let administrators govern who can use the AI Agent, so you can adopt AI capabilities in line with your organization’s security and governance requirements.
Security Observability
Ansible-driven patch remediation: Security Observability now integrates with Ansible to help you act on findings—streamlining the path from identifying a vulnerable system to remediating it.
Risk-score enhancements: Extended risk scoring Aruba EdgeConnect, Silver Peak SD-WAN (ECOS, VXOA), and ZTE ZXR10 devices. GUI has added OS categorization, machine-type filters, filter reset, and bulk select.
Expanded Cloud Monitoring and Cost Management
We continue to deepen coverage across AWS, Azure, and GCP—both for cost visibility and for cloud connectivity.
Cloud cost management: Building on the Cloud Cost dashboard, we’ve added a dedicated GCP cost detail page for deeper, GCP-specific analysis. We’ve also introduced custom time-range filtering for Azure and AWS cloud providers and a month/year view of costs for GCP,[GM1] so you can analyze spending over the exact periods you care about rather than fixed windows.
New cloud connectivity monitoring: This release expands visibility into hybrid connectivity with GCP Cloud Router and Azure ExpressRoute peering.
AWS Organization Credential Support: Use AWS AssumeRole with CloudWatch organizational credentials to monitor resources across your AWS organization from a centralized credential model. Get broader multi-account visibility with less credential sprawl and less manual setup.
Cloud polling on Additional Polling Engines: Cloud monitoring for AWS, Azure, and GCP can now run on Additional Polling Engines, improving scale and deployment flexibility for larger and distributed environments. Polling Engine failover is supported.
Anomaly-Based Alerting for cloud VMs: ABA’s AI-based anomaly detection now covers cloud virtual machines, extending proactive, baseline-aware alerting into your cloud estate.
New Network Features
Traffic Path Analysis: Use a Sankey visualization to show how traffic moves end to end across dimensions such as countries, endpoints, applications, protocols, and ports. Instead of piecing together separate rankings, teams can follow high-volume paths in one view to troubleshoot congestion faster, understand application usage, and plan capacity with greater confidence. Learn more about Traffic Path Analysis.
Switch Stack Configuration Management: Orchestrate firmware upgrades across Cisco Catalyst 9000-series switch stacks from a single Network Configuration Manager template—so you can manage the full stack instead of upgrading each member individually.
Broader Device Support
Multi-vendor coverage continues to grow and modernize across networking, storage, and virtualization. Each newly supported entity appears appropriately across dashboards, reports, and alerts.
- Load balancers: New SNMP support for the F5 VELOS and F5 R-Series platforms.
- Switches: Support for Ruckus switch stacks, environmental sensors, and VLANs.
- SD-WAN: New support for Versa Networks devices and Improvements for Cisco Viptela vEdge.
- Storage: Support for Pure Storage API coverage (2.x). PowerMax External Provider Support.
- Virtualization: Nutanix polling has been migrated to the v4 API for continued compatibility.
Key Platform Improvements
SLA Mute mode for Maintenance Window: A new SLA Mute option lets you keep monitoring a device during a maintenance window while excluding that period from availability and SLA calculations. Unlike Unmanage, which stops collection entirely, SLA Mute preserves visibility and alerting while protecting your SLA metrics from planned work.
GUI modernization. We continue moving core experiences onto the modern framework:
- The Enterprise Operations Console (EOC) now defaults to modern UI
- New Network Discovery experience brings a cleaner, guided workflow to onboarding your environment.
- Additional minor UI enhancements
Extended Engine Load Balancing. Automatic engine load balancing now covers WMI/WinRM, further reducing the manual effort of keeping polling evenly distributed across engines in a High Availability pool.
Accessibility. Improved 508 compliance, reflecting our ongoing commitment to accessible, standards-aligned experiences.
Offline licensing flexibility. Deactivating licenses while offline start a 6 hour grace period, giving you time to manage your licenses with no downtime.
Alerting integrations. Forwarded alerts to ServiceNow, Service Desk, and SolarWinds Incident Response can now include Asset ID, improving correlation and downstream workflows in your ITSM tools.
Security Always
We focus on securely coding, building, and delivering software to you. SolarWinds Aims to Set New Standard in Software Development with Next-Generation Build System. Our choices in forging the SolarWinds Platform align with our Secure by Design philosophy, enhancing our ability to execute this vision now and in the future.
How to Download
The 2026.4 release is a fully tested and supported version and is ready to install on a new server or to update your current one.
For all current licensed customers (both Observability Self-Hosted and Orion module), the release is available now! You can log in to your customer portal and download it.
If you don’t own Observability Self-Hosted but would like to try it, there are a couple of options for you:
- Download a 30-day free trial from customer portal and install it on a new server.
- If you’re a current module or bundle customer, upgrade to 2026.4 first and use the instant evaluation feature in the License Manager page to easily try Observability Self-Hosted for 30 days with a click of a button. You can switch back to your modules anytime.
To see everything included in the release, check out the Release Notes.
Not Quite Ready for the Release Candidate?
If you aren’t ready to upgrade to the Release Candidate, the latest GA version 2026.2.2 is available – see the 2026.2.2 Release Notes for all the details.
What’s Next?
The 2026.4 release is another step forward, but there is always more to do. Check out our What We’re Working On post for what’s coming next for the SolarWinds Self-Hosted platform and products.
—The Observability Self-Hosted Team
