Likelihood to Recommend Track-It! is great for a small-to-medium sized enterprise that has a fairly small IT department but needs far more control of tickets than just email and spreadsheets. It scales well enough as IT departments grow, adding techs is simple enough, as is changing the workflow. A large company would probably be better off with a different solution. The lack of easy customization, and the shortcomings it has in workflow templates (which would be a nightmare for project management) means it won't scale up that far.
Read full review Well suited in an IT environment where you have limited staff. It can be managed by one administrator. Reliability of the SaaS environment has been excellent. Flexibility in developing automated workflows to open, manage, and close Incidents. Change Management due to ability to modify OOB to meet the needs of our staff. Contract Management allowing us to be notified when a contract or license is up for renewal and setting reminders. Integrations are not easy to create and manage.
Read full review Pros The software is simple to use. There doesn't seem to be a lot of bells and whistles which could be attractive to some users. It includes email notifications where users are able to respond to an email and it updates the ticket. The system gives you the ability to customize your view so that you only need to see that tickets that are relevant to you or your group. Read full review Cherwell's email handling automation works flawlessly. The only time that I have ever needed to reset the automation service that drives it is when my own server that houses the small connecting agent has some kind of problem and disconnects us from our hosted Cherwell instance. It just works. Emails to a certain address always result in a new ticket or update to an existing ticket. Cherwell is literally 100% customization in so many ways that it would be pointless to try to enumerate them. There is a very sizable list of already-created customizations (called "mApps") that you can download and apply to your instance. If you don't like them you can roll them back in seconds. But you can add and configure entire modules using one of these pre-defined, completely free, add-on packages. It's so easy to add features this way that I check the list of available mApps every month or so just to see what functionality I can add. Read full review Cons Configuration is convoluted in my opinion. Getting the email to flow how you'd like is difficult. A lot of the configuration option names aren't very clear. It seems they use their own terminology for things I would have never guessed. Support is lacking - asking them for help always results in them directing you to a KB article. Sometimes you just want hand holding. Read full review Cherwell lacks modern UI capabilities such as responsive forms and CSS styling for web portals. Built-in reporting engine is hard to use and resource intensive to run. No patching model for small platform fixes, must upgrade to receive platform code changes. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Cherwell is still the best tool for the job in the market. Even though Ivanti bought them and are trying to convince everyone to move over to Neurons for ITSM, they have stated Cherwell will remain supported indefinitely and have a roadmap for future Cherwell development. Unfortunately, ISM is not as flexible as Cherwell (and the UX is atrocious), hence why many people are sticking with Cherwell (and why many Cherwell customers never purchased ISM originally)
Read full review Usability I enjoy the layout and configuration of our Cherwell Service Management instance. It did take me a bit to get used to, as with any new ticketing system, but now that I understand the system more, I thoroughly enjoy it! There are just so many options and the UI is very intuitive.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Almost always available, with exception for a handful of outages due to infrastructure related issues
Read full review Performance The browser client is mostly acceptable in terms of performance, but still lacks parity with the rich client. The rich client is not very performant at all. It's built on old architecture and relies heavily on a fast internet connection, good caching and database indexing. There are several unwritten rules with form design (and form arrangement) which most users are not aware of, but can severely impact performance in the rich client. This is where the flexibility of Cherwell can come back to bite you if you step outside the boundaries of these unwritten rules
Read full review Support Rating We have rarely needed to use Support for BMC Track-It!, but in the times that we did need to use it, they were excellent. The biggest issue is that after not paying for support for about three years, now that we NEED support, it is too expensive for us to receive. This is due to the way their support is billed. So long as you never drop support, then you should be fine.
Read full review We generally have a good time with Cherwell support, however, there are the few niche cases where I have to explain how Cherwell works to the customer support agent on the other end. A little more product education for tier 1 support could go a long way in helping expedite support requests from SaaS customers.
Read full review In-Person Training I didn't partake in the in-person training, but it was available. I preferred the online method instead, which was a great experience. It was nice to have someone available to bounce questions off of and demonstrate how certain functions worked.
Read full review Online Training The training was great! We got together to review the system, its UI, and how to perform basic functions. Then there was plenty of time to ask questions and test out the system while there was someone available to assist.
Read full review Implementation Rating Implementation is a breeze. Each time I've implemented it, we had an outsourced vendor overseeing it & assisting where needed. However, Cherwell OOTB is ready to go, and configuring it for LDAP/SAML, etc. for authentication and user-imports is really straight forward. The infrastructure needed for Cherwell is extremely simple too - and installing the server & database takes no more than 20 mins
Read full review Alternatives Considered BMC Track-It! is much more bare bones compared to ServiceNow products, and if your department has the money, ServiceNow is a much better option. Not only is the Knowledge Base much easier to create and publish articles, but the asset management in BMC Track-It! is practically useless. BMC Track-It! is more cost effective, and with a small amount of technicians there's likely no reason to need a bigger solution, but it leaves a lot wanting.
Read full review Much more customizable than other products, especially when ran in a self-hosted environment. Cherwell [Service Management] allows for greater flexibility of custom development and integrations to allow for automating tasks that traditional ITSM apps are not well suited for. Cherwell [Service Management] gives you the freedom to develop your own objects with minimal licensing costs.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model We have had great contracts with Cherwell and love the concurrent licensing model
Read full review Scalability We have never had any major show-stopper issues with Cherwell itself - more so with the infrastructure it sits on. Moving from in-house cloud (on Cherwell's side), to AWS then to Azure has caused multiple problems over the years (some still on-going), however the product has remained fairly stable
Read full review Professional Services As mentioned, they were always great to work with (minus the project management side). My only feedback would be to push back on requirements that don't make sense
Read full review Return on Investment The biggest positive impact it had on ROI was that the software itself didn't require any expensive ongoing maintenance contracts since it was installed and managed by our organization. The negative aspect of this is if there was a major problem with the software, then it would require contacting the vendor, at which point it could become expensive for a service call. Read full review As with any standard ticketing system, it helped decrease the time before first contact with clients. Our department was always concerned with keeping a low budget, and it was cheaper than most. My supervisor could easily tell how many resources were being put into each employee, so we had more visibility of our team's capabilities at a given time if we needed to take on something complex. Read full review ScreenShots