Atera is presented as an Agentic AI platform for IT management, that offers a digital workforce of AI agents that proactively and autonomously support entire IT operations. Atera’s all-in-one IT management platform consolidates RMM, helpdesk, ticketing, and automation, so IT teams and MSPs can manage and protect infrastructure, automate tasks, and boost service quality by reducing downtime and improving SLAs. Atera has shifted focus from automation to AI-powered autonomy in IT. With…
$139
per month per user
SolarWinds Service Desk
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage) is a cloud-based, multi-tenant IT service desk and asset management software for IT and enterprise service management. Samanage is on a single, always new instance of software. The service desk includes a self-service portal, service catalog, knowledge base, and SLA management tool. The integrated agent-based asset management solution collects contracts and licensing data from Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix systems.
Atera is doing well in the monitoring part as it is informing the real time ping of running devices and if any device goes down, it is informing us on the real time. It is helping us to monitor the last reboot status, current logged in users, time zone, IP addresses and other things so that we can track our end devices status. In the patching part Atera is pathing our all devices with the notification stating user to restart device at their convenient time. It is also patching our third party applications. It is good in installing and uninstalling of the third party application but limited to availability in the Atera inventory. Atera is not good in some parts such as in the patching part of applications, sometime it fails to update all 3rd party applications that were not installed via Atera. It is not good if you have to transfer a file to multiple systems at the same time.
If you are looking for a way to support a company and bill based on the outcome this software works really well. If it's a quick password change there was no charge, but if it's troubleshooting things you click the box to charge. It works really well for this. Also bringing all your assets into this and associating them to a client works well. I can't think of anything that this software would not be less appropriate for. It works well for what we use it for.
Atera is very helpful in monitoring the servers and end-user devices for high CPU, memory, hard disk uses, and temperature monitoring.
Atera is good at installing third-party applications and also helps to remove it from the end systems.
Atera is perfect for patching as you can select the patches as per your need and reject those that are not required for you or going to disturb any of your internal applications.
Atera is good for managing software inventory as it provides you with the complete software list that is used in your infrastructure.
Approval flows: You can have multiple layers of approval required for the tickets and service requests you design. This helps us show auditors that access to privileged systems and data was formerly reviewed and approved by the appropriate managers.
Easy to design forms: You don't need to spend hours reading the documentation to figure out how to create forms. It's simple enough that you can just jump right in and start creating them with minimal training.
Lots of options and features are available for you to include in your forms.
Integrates well with SAML-based SSO and has capabilities for MFA.
Easy and useful search function. Need to find that ticket from last year that you worked for a particular user or issue? Just search by keyword or username, and it'll quickly find the ticket.
Atera does not yet have a MDM system, but I have been told that it is in the works!
Sometimes getting around the admin section of the IT side of Atera can be tricky, but the webinars and chat support help.
Many of the demo and onboarding agents are based in Israel, so it can be a challenge to find available times during the day while living in the United States.
There is potential to greatly improve the capacity for cascading attributes. Currently, categories are limited to a top-level category and one subcategory. This leaves a fairly shallow decision tree.
Greater flexibility to modify the layout of incident request forms.
More integration options for cloud file-sharing platforms. Solarwinds Service Desk has tie-ins to Dropbox but not other vendors.
As of right now, we have found nothing that can offer as many features as Atera does along with the affordability. They are doing monthly releases each month and not just making small changes (shared scripting library, chocolatey support, Install packages, Splashtop SOS support, Scheduled tickets to name a few). The uptimes are great and accessibility to the dashboard has yet to be limited. We are a happy customer and bordering on fanboy status now
My renewal is soon coming up, it is fairly likely I will renew again for the 5th year. I may consider evaluating what else is out there, It was requested by my staff to not make a change. They feel that SSD fits our needs, is easy to use and should keep it.
Atera's remote monitoring feature is one of it's best features. The laptops and servers we used it on responded quickly to our administrative task requests and made our work light. We were able to increase the resources, manage patches, windows updates and quite a few other tasks remotely and that too 24×7.
Solarwinds Service Desk has a very "user friendly" interface. Everything looks nice and neat. And, learning how to use the system is very easy. It provides multiple services that are easy for most people to grasp, and allows for great organization of incidents and assets. Support for Solarwinds Service Desk has a good response and resolution time and are easy to work with.
Because the data is stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS) there are very rarely any outages. There have been some times when the product has been slow to load, but because the interface is web based it could be anything between my computer and AWS that was causing the issue. But also, because the application is web based it can be access from anywhere which makes it very convenient
When the system is working, the pages load very quickly. We run reports all the time in the system. The reporting can be extremely complex or very simple. Either way, we have not had any issues with the reports. We do not currently integrate Solarwinds Service Desk with any other software.
Atera support provides answers to my questions lightning fast. They have never left me feeling like I'm out there on my own. I can ask questions by email, or by chat, or by opening a ticket with them and they are always on it quickly. They also have a forum where other Atera users can help you if you need it, and you can also add feature requests via the forum.
SolarWinds support department will respond to you quickly from the time of purchase to after-purchase instructions & supporting, and the company is great in customers support. In buying a software, our organization always has a priority for the seller and support and accountability is very important to us, and the manufacturer or seller must be responsible and supportive.
When we first purchased Samanage (now Solarwinds) they provided us with an informational training session to show us all of the basics on how the service works and showed us everything we were interested in using. There are still some areas of Solarwinds that we do not yet utilize but I know if we choose to use them in the future we would be able to schedule another session with our representative to have them show us what we need to know.
The implementation process for our organization was fairly simple. We set up an email address to receive the emails from the system (for incident creation), and we allowed the system to spoof our IT email to respond to requests. Solarwinds helped us with the rest of the implementation, and it took less than a week to get the system fully operational.
Because Atera is a much more effective and efficient solution to manage all our IT operations, it automates each of our business processes. It offers us the best support to respond to any problem that may arise. I think Atera is much more cost-effective and reliable; its value is justified with each function and satisfies all our business needs and requirements.
We chose SolarWinds Service Desk for its user friendly platform compared to what we had. Its was easier for requestors to submit tickets, provide feedback, merge tickets, build a suitable approval process. Our organization had a hard time going back and forth with the end user on providing a status on their request or issue, where most users just didn't follow through or lost interest in their issue. We would have to send multiple emails to get any type of feedback and that's something we did not want to keep on doing.
We have over 500 computers and tablets across our organization and this has helped us greatly in keeping track of where computers are and who is currently using it. I can see this product being useful to groups both larger and smaller than us and I really appreciate this product.
The intuitive user interface has enabled both users and support technicians to familiarize themselves quickly with the functionality, and the learning curve is less.
Some features need to be accessed through documentation; they're not available directly on the dashboard.
Sometimes, internet access plays a significant role, whereas low connectivity is a hindrance.
We are more easily able to quantify user satisfaction with support.
We are able to develop SLAs that quantify and define the obligation of our support teams.
The actual cost of Solarwinds Service Desk per agent user is high in our estimation. The more you implement this platform across your organization, the more tightly tethered you are to this solution.
