KACE Systems Management Appliance vs SolarWinds Service Desk

• Inventory: KACE provides a ton of hardware and software inventory information that is easy to search, filter, and export. This is critical when we need to find the answers to questions about how many of such and such we have in our fleet.
• Patch Management: We were using WSUS before and it was altogether too cumbersome. KACE has given us the power, flexibility, and verification we need to feel comfortable our patches are up-to-date.
• Service Queue: We made KACE our help desk system and it does everything we need it to do. Great improvement over our old system.

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• 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.

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• The KACE SMA needs a better way to handle different roles in the software so certain users can access or administrate certain parts of the software, but not the entire software installation.
• The KACE SMA could improve the ticketing process of projects. The aspects of the title and some information do not always flow down from the parent ticket to its child tickets.
• The KACE SMA could improve the UI of the software with the addition of different CSS color schemes.

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• 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.

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• KACE has saved us from having to spend several days of employee hours in crafting DVDs and duplicating them (100+ DVDs)
• KACE has saved us on the postage required to send out those DVDs for every update (monthly) to all of our customers electronically

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• SLA Management is working well as built, allowing for follow-ups.
• Notifications are working extremely well for SLA Management and tickets in general.
• Processing e-mail-to-incident is works very well, having no issues.
• Problem Management is difficult, as closing the problem does not change the status of the attached incidents.
• SLAs can be tough as notifying direct managers isn't possible just based on the assignee that I can find.
• The SCCM connection for asset discovery doesn't appear to work on the Windows-based scanner; it does seem to work on the Linux-based scanners, though.
• Domain mapping, when licensed, helps by granting users an easy to remember link to access.
• Okta integration is extremely helpful, but somewhat difficult to set up with user provisioning.

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