Likelihood to Recommend It [SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM)] is well suited for small to medium sized companies who want to enhance and ease up their daily work. As well as it is suited for organized structures, it has its problems with very complex environments. For example, if you are working with direct and multiple permissions instead of having more granular group based permissions.
Read full review Well suited in an IT environment where you have limited staff. It can be managed by one administrator. Reliability of the SaaS environment has been excellent. Flexibility in developing automated workflows to open, manage, and close Incidents. Change Management due to ability to modify OOB to meet the needs of our staff. Contract Management allowing us to be notified when a contract or license is up for renewal and setting reminders. Integrations are not easy to create and manage.
Read full review Pros SolarWinds Access Rights Manager is easy to set up and configure. We had the first report generated in a few hours. The automated feature for the reports is great. We just set it and forget it and now the reports get emailed on schedule. Read full review Cherwell's email handling automation works flawlessly. The only time that I have ever needed to reset the automation service that drives it is when my own server that houses the small connecting agent has some kind of problem and disconnects us from our hosted Cherwell instance. It just works. Emails to a certain address always result in a new ticket or update to an existing ticket. Cherwell is literally 100% customization in so many ways that it would be pointless to try to enumerate them. There is a very sizable list of already-created customizations (called "mApps") that you can download and apply to your instance. If you don't like them you can roll them back in seconds. But you can add and configure entire modules using one of these pre-defined, completely free, add-on packages. It's so easy to add features this way that I check the list of available mApps every month or so just to see what functionality I can add. Read full review Cons Licensing model when we changed over to SolarWinds was [I feel] a nightmare. It needs to be more streamlined and SolarWinds needs to understand what their customers require. When we changed over to SolarWinds we found it very hard to get answers to what modules we were still licensed for. Our current system is not functioning. We can't login to the application with the accounts we created that were working. The error that appears doesn't help to resolve it. So at present we just renewed licenses for this year and we can't use the system. Read full review Cherwell lacks modern UI capabilities such as responsive forms and CSS styling for web portals. Built-in reporting engine is hard to use and resource intensive to run. No patching model for small platform fixes, must upgrade to receive platform code changes. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It is in place and working. No time or money to consider anything else.
Read full review Cherwell is still the best tool for the job in the market. Even though Ivanti bought them and are trying to convince everyone to move over to Neurons for ITSM, they have stated Cherwell will remain supported indefinitely and have a roadmap for future Cherwell development. Unfortunately, ISM is not as flexible as Cherwell (and the UX is atrocious), hence why many people are sticking with Cherwell (and why many Cherwell customers never purchased ISM originally)
Read full review Usability End user experience is much better than administration
Read full review I enjoy the layout and configuration of our Cherwell Service Management instance. It did take me a bit to get used to, as with any new ticketing system, but now that I understand the system more, I thoroughly enjoy it! There are just so many options and the UI is very intuitive.
Read full review Reliability and Availability On occasion the server will need to be restarted to get things running again
Read full review Almost always available, with exception for a handful of outages due to infrastructure related issues
Read full review Performance Satisfactory performance
Read full review The browser client is mostly acceptable in terms of performance, but still lacks parity with the rich client. The rich client is not very performant at all. It's built on old architecture and relies heavily on a fast internet connection, good caching and database indexing. There are several unwritten rules with form design (and form arrangement) which most users are not aware of, but can severely impact performance in the rich client. This is where the flexibility of Cherwell can come back to bite you if you step outside the boundaries of these unwritten rules
Read full review Support Rating Very slow response times and sometimes I found the solution and ended up sharing it with support
Read full review We generally have a good time with Cherwell support, however, there are the few niche cases where I have to explain how Cherwell works to the customer support agent on the other end. A little more product education for tier 1 support could go a long way in helping expedite support requests from SaaS customers.
Read full review In-Person Training I didn't partake in the in-person training, but it was available. I preferred the online method instead, which was a great experience. It was nice to have someone available to bounce questions off of and demonstrate how certain functions worked.
Read full review Online Training The training was great! We got together to review the system, its UI, and how to perform basic functions. Then there was plenty of time to ask questions and test out the system while there was someone available to assist.
Read full review Implementation Rating It was my first exposure to this type of product and I wasn’t given the time to figure out how best to implement it. I would say get a plan together of what you are tying to accomplish first
Read full review Implementation is a breeze. Each time I've implemented it, we had an outsourced vendor overseeing it & assisting where needed. However, Cherwell OOTB is ready to go, and configuring it for LDAP/SAML, etc. for authentication and user-imports is really straight forward. The infrastructure needed for Cherwell is extremely simple too - and installing the server & database takes no more than 20 mins
Read full review Alternatives Considered I found the installation and configuration to be much easier and more straightforward. What also assisted in the decision to go with Access Rights Manager, was the fact we already made use of Solarwinds products. Knowing from previous experiences with their support staff, meant we knew how great their after-hours support was whenever we had any technical issues with the platform. We felt it would be better to keep it all under one roof so to speak
Read full review Much more customizable than other products, especially when ran in a self-hosted environment. Cherwell [Service Management] allows for greater flexibility of custom development and integrations to allow for automating tasks that traditional ITSM apps are not well suited for. Cherwell [Service Management] gives you the freedom to develop your own objects with minimal licensing costs.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model We have had great contracts with Cherwell and love the concurrent licensing model
Read full review Scalability No experience with this
Read full review We have never had any major show-stopper issues with Cherwell itself - more so with the infrastructure it sits on. Moving from in-house cloud (on Cherwell's side), to AWS then to Azure has caused multiple problems over the years (some still on-going), however the product has remained fairly stable
Read full review Professional Services As mentioned, they were always great to work with (minus the project management side). My only feedback would be to push back on requirements that don't make sense
Read full review Return on Investment Team leads recieve automated reports of permissions within their team, and it allows them to proactively audit their team members Security specialists have really clear dashboards to audit individuals We can be sure we never leave a permission open after a person leaves Read full review As with any standard ticketing system, it helped decrease the time before first contact with clients. Our department was always concerned with keeping a low budget, and it was cheaper than most. My supervisor could easily tell how many resources were being put into each employee, so we had more visibility of our team's capabilities at a given time if we needed to take on something complex. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM) Screenshots