Desk.com (discontinued) vs. IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager

Once I had to search the logs to find cases and data on a particular keyword, but I was not able to do so as there was no search tool available, nor was there a sort or filter tool. I was totally frustrated as I had to skim through the data to complete my task manually.

Incentivized

SQL Server [Business Intelligence] Manager is useful for tracking performance across SSIS, SSRS and SSA and have the data represented in dashboards. It helps improve performance and helps end users. However, several features are redundant for smaller organization that can use the tools that comes with existing Microsoft products. These features also takes time to learn and use.

Incentivized

• Desk.com automatically tracks analytics on all cases coming in and going out.
• Desk.com helps prevent multiple people from working on the same case. However, it does allow us to assign the case to someone else if we feel that person is more qualified to address the case.
• Desk.com has very few bugs or server issues that we've seen. This helps prevent any delays in communicating with our customers.

Incentivized

• SQLdm does a good job of providing information at a high level, but also allows me to drill down to specific queries and events if needed. I don't always need to sift through tons of details to get the information I need. It also gives a very wide range of information from SQL specific metrics, to OS metrics, to VM metrics, all the way up to host server metrics.
• I like how the alert and notification system can be customized. For example, if you know a certain server regularly has long-running queries, you can adjust the alert to not fire unless a query has been running for 30 minutes while the rest of the servers fire after 30 seconds. That is very helpful in not being bombarded at dinner with alerts from a server similar to, "I've been at 90% cpu for 26 milliseconds!!!!!!!...and now it's back down to 30%" Good information to know, but not something you need to literally lose sleep over.
• I like how you can configure different servers to be monitored differently. For example, you can have a group of servers called DEVELOPMENT that you can turn on heavier monitoring on so you can test how changes in applications might affect the SQL environment, but in the PRODUCTION group, you may only want to enable the heavier analysis and logging when performance issues are actively being reported.

Incentivized

• Internal knowledge tools are clunky and annoying to access, outside the regular workflow of everyday staff
• Arbitrary and confusing limitations in business rules and custom fields
• Arbitrary and confusing limitations in case handling - for example, if you begin a case as a phone call you CANNOT email the customer from the case. As though no one working at Desk has ever sent a follow-up email...?
• Not very good for B2B, mid-to-large businesses. Difficult to set business rules based on company information (for example, service level/tier) and nearly impossible to track key stakeholders and get clear insight into the relationship at a high level
• Reporting tools are clunky, slow, and just all-around pretty useless

Incentivized

• Windows client has some issues. When you have small time intervals for your data collection, it can cause the client to become unresponsive and require you to restart it.
• It takes more time to get the web client running than it does to get the windows client running.
• The visualizations have been the same for the last eight years--could use a little bit of a refresh.

Incentivized

We will be very likely to renew our contract with Desk.com. It is easy to use, and provides us with everything we need to keep our customers and employees happy. They have also been very helpful in catering the application to our specific and unique needs, including working across brands and adding specific content for our products

Incentivized

Desk.com and Salesforce Service Cloud's usability is seamless to get up and running, administer, and scale across the organization. It allows us to get up and running in days rather than weeks and has transformed our customer support teams globally into efficient, world-class teams. The best practices that the Salesforce and Desk.com teams provide are also very valuable, as we have the right case studies and tips to implement right away in our organization.

Incentivized

We've never had a problem with Desk.com's availability.

Fast, responsive, gorgeous, and fun. It's always run like a thoroughbred for me.

Their support leaves much to be desired. They do not respond quickly and do not follow up with feature requests. There is also a lack of on-demand or live training available for the teams to use as they learn a new tool. Because there is so much customization, a lot of questions do come up regularly.

Incentivized

As I stated earlier, implementation of Desk.com went more smoothly than most. The resources in the "Support Center" are fantastic, and I never ran into anything that left me stumped, angry, or disappointed.

Overall, it performs a lot better than all three combined, with a lot fewer glitches and a lot more user-friendly and user experience efficiency. Any new link that needs to be done, takes a lot less time to execute on desk compared to the three others. Simply advanced when it comes to execution this platform is.

Incentivized

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL, Redgate SQL, and MonitorLogicMonitor are similar products to each other. We decided on IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL because our experience with locating heavy queries has been very good and it provides real-time monitoring of all servers and databases. It also allows you to have a large volume of historical data which allows you to analyze trends in the databases.

Incentivized

• Better customer service and employee efficiency when dealing with cases
• It's so universal, meaning that everyone can use it and it's easy to understand.
• The only negative impact is that our IT department who is assigned tickets has responded to customers instead of to the local reps and we have to ensure they know to change the email if it's assigned to them.

Incentivized

• Allows us to quickly set up ETL processes as soon as we installed SQL Server.
• There's a lot of free/paid resources available online, decreasing development time.
• A tool with plenty of experienced developers.

Incentivized