Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk, now including features from the former Mindville Insight, acquired by Atlassian in June 2020) is a service desk software that is purpose-built for IT, service, and support teams. The software provides everything IT and support teams need out-of-the-box for service request, incident, problem and change management. Jira Service Management integrates seamlessly with Jira Software so that IT and development teams can work better together. Users…
$0
per month
N-able N-central
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
MSPs
and IT professionals use N-able™ N-central® to monitor and manage devices and complex
networks remotely. N-central provides
visibility and efficiency as the user's needs scale. N-central can help users:
1. Proactively monitor everything on a customer network—not just servers
and workstations—and troubleshoot.
2. Stay on top of threats with features like MFA, antivirus, integrated endpoint
detection and response, data backup, disk encryption, email protection,…
Great to manage your issues in a clear and centralised way. If your development teams work with Jira, it will all naturally come together. Great way to manage the issues from end to end. - Very flexible if you have people who understands the set up and is able to configure it for your needs - Maybe not the best if you want something with very easy set up
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.
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.
Ability to control the number of email notifications received (Note: this is a new feature in the Latest release but I personally haven not extensively looked at it and how well it solves the existing problem).
No way to reply to multiple tickets at once, say you got 4 tickets in for the same issue, there is no way you can reply to them in one stroke. Other Ticketing systems do have this ability.
Using a large number of add-ons to customize and add additional features adds up quickly and can become rather expensive.
Request forms are very basic and there is no native dynamic field ability available.
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.
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.
Jira Service Management tool will serve it's purpose to do what it is meant to be. It has it's own limitataions on few features, however it's the industry standard ticketing tool. All covers all the processes that required to resolve the issues. It has various use cases in incident management, Request management etc.
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.
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.
When I evaluated Spiceworks, it was not going to be replacing any ticketing systems. However, I did evaluate it and was not extremely impressed by the short demo I did. JIRA was selected because a branch of our company was already using it, so it made sense to consolidate into one service desk solution, and JIRA was the better option since it was less expensive and geared towards being a ticketing system.
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.
