Jira Service Management vs. N-able N-central

I think using a ticketing system is very easy to use and allows multiple teams to create help desks in the same portal. In terms of internal usage, I think this is a great option. However, suppose you're trying to keep internal items and external helpdesks in the same instance. In that case, this is not ideal, as there is no effective way to separate the two instances to protect internal data better.

Incentivized

N-Able is perfect for an MSP environment. It gives all the standard functionality an IT professional needs out of the box and can be configured to show almost anything required. For example, we have configured a dashboard to show when our backups need attention for each customer. This is achieved by running a small script on repeat via N-Central everyday/evening, and the result gives us information on the dashboard to help us identify exactly what is working and what needs looking into.

Incentivized

• Integration with many of the most common tools companies are using (Slack, MS Teams, Salesforce, ... etc)
• Natural workflow with Jira (as product development / project management tool) which makes the full fix and follow up of the tickets / issues very easy to follow
• Allow multiple different entry points and work flows for as many different needs your teams / company have

• Remote tasks - entry-level techs can run basic tasks without physically touching a piece of equipment.
• Remote support - remote controlling user devices is easy and saves a lot of time with having to initiate a remote session.
• Management of devices, particularly patch management and anti-virus management - you can automatically approve and deploy patches and schedule automatic AV scans.

• Navigating through issues outside of a kan ban board can be confusing and task heavy.
• It's easy to clutter up the tool. It could use some easy clean up capabilities.
• User interface is decent, but could use work to make it more intuitive.

Incentivized

• Customer support just points to online guides and I feel they aren't helpful.
• During the trial they turn on a lot of features. In my experience, if you play around with the features, they charge you for them. Keep this in mind if you move forward with N-Able - they will charge for "trialed" services.
• In my experience, some services that you're being charged for can't be disabled or monitored by you or your team. You only see them on the monthly invoice.
• In my opinion, the "Scripting Automation" doesn't provide value. You're either going to be writing your own batch or Powershell to make scripting work.
• In my opinion, monitoring software deployments is painful.
• The default monitoring template can't be duplicated, edited, or referenced. You'll find that the default monitors in an unusual way and will throw needless recurring alerts into your ticketing system. To avoid this, you need to create a template from scratch which takes many hours to set up.
• In my opinion, they're more concerned about a quick buck than customer service. "Buyer beware" company.

In the current contect the requirments is around having a tool that is focused and can handle large ticket volumes and tracking incident, problem and user requests concerning end users. Jira has built in functionality to address the above practice needs faily easily and has a substantial amount of customizable reports for generating the relevant intelligence.

Incentivized

Overall we have liked our solar winds experience, however, as our company has grown to support larger enterprises, this product does not have the functionality that our teams need in order to fully support them. The lack of granularity with backups and lack of ability to support nutanix environments is slowly drawing us into the use of other tools.

Incentivized

If you're used to other tools in the Atlassian ecosystem, you'll feel right at home with JSM. It's also a platform that technical folk can easily pick up. However, I wouldn't recommend using JSM as a company's first jumping off point into Atlassian. There are a lot of other 'newer' tools that provide sleeker ITSM systems at a similar cost.

Incentivized

The user interface is fairly straight forward, with logic groupings for objects. I did not deploy this software, but am one of the daily administrators. Once you get the correct agent package (Which can be a challenge) the integration into AD is not bad. The UI could be more customized, but that may have been a design choice.

Incentivized

I gave JIRA a 9 rating since for me JIRA works according to its purpose. Since there is a customer portal, our clients can leave a comment or communicate with us using the PR ticket that way it is easier for us to also request any additional information we need for our investigation.

Every time we have reached out to SolarWinds they are quick to respond, even offering support chat 24/7. Their support team is great and works with you to find solutions to issues. They have taken items we had issues with before and used those to create updates so that the issue is handled better in the future.

Incentivized

Make sure if you your using a vm you follow the instructions for provisioning to the letter or it will be starting from square one

Incentivized

Zendesk is a similar ticketing system that our organization used before JIRA Service Desk. The main drawback of Zendesk was that it can only be used as a cloud service. This means that our company data would be living on the internet at the hands of their security team. Another drawback of this is the price is significantly more expensive rather than hosting it yourself. Zendesk does have some additional features such as commenting on multiple tickets at once that JSD does lack. However, switching to JSD was significantly more cost effective because we have the ability and the infrastructure to host our own ticketing system, something that Zendesk could not provide. Ultimatley switching to JSD saved us money and allows the ability for integration with all of the other Atlassian Suite products that we use on a day to day basis.

Incentivized

Our version of SolarWinds was old and running on old hardware, but it was way easier to setup and do things with. It did not do everything N-able does such as patch management, or at least we didn't have a module to do so if one existed. However it definitely seemed easier to use and possibly more stable.

• It is definitely cheaper than Salesforce
• It allows the IT service desk to be more organized and respond more quickly to tickets, which can save time for both agent and requester.
• Some things are "not quite there" developmentally, so this means that internal IT will need to spend more time developing and testing the product.

Incentivized

• We have lost hundreds of hours on the phone/emailing support with no resolution for any of our issues
• We had to move all of our services away which was very painful
• Staff satisfaction was low having to deal with this company