PDQ Deploy & Inventory vs. ServiceNow IT Service Management vs. SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)

PDQ Inventory is great if you have a local network of computers on or off a domain. As long as you have a way to log into them with common credentials. Great for large organizations, particularly ones interconnected with VPNs. PDQ Inventory isn't so great for PCs that aren't connected to the same LAN the server is on. (i.e. non-vpn remote users) They used to have a remote agent you could install, but it was removed after numerous issues.

Incentivized

It is well suited for medium to large companies that require a tool to allow users to create IT requests, have a self-service portal, track the completion of such requests and have access to KPIs to understand the satisaction level of the requestors. It is not the best tool if you want to have a heavy personalized IT Service Management tool to cater to all your needs or when you want to have an easy way to search for past tickets using specific keywords.

Incentivized

If you are looking for a way to support a company and bill based on the outcome this software works really well. If it's a quick password change there was no charge, but if it's troubleshooting things you click the box to charge. It works really well for this. Also bringing all your assets into this and associating them to a client works well. I can't think of anything that this software would not be less appropriate for. It works well for what we use it for.

Incentivized

• Push out new software
• Push out Updates to current software
• Push out patches and updates that we don't have other ways to push out
• Keep end-users updated with little involvement

Incentivized

• Integration
• Good search capabilities. Applications are created within CMDB and we can search for the app to see the changes, incidents and problems created
• Reporting. Great store of MIS reports and will let you to create custom reports
• Visual Task Boards - use it as Kanban boards

• 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.

Incentivized

• As good as there email support is.. would like a live operator option
• Some updates are hard to understand when 5 versions of the same program exist
• Thats about it, PDQ deploy is the best out there

Incentivized

• Finding requests that I opened and have since been completed by the assigned group/individual is very difficult to accomplish unless I've written down the request numbers somewhere.
• Requests that I opened and are subsequently closed, often continue to appear in the list of "My Open Requests" giving the appearance that they were not completed when in fact they were.
• It may exist, but if it does I haven't found it yet, which makes it less than intuitive, but I would like to see the ability to recall a request in ServiceNow.
• I believe our firewall rule change request for is a custom form, but it has a serious drawback. If I submit such a request and need to make a correction to it before it is approved, there isn't anyway for me to do so. The request has to first be rejected with the creation of a sub-task in order to edit it before it is resubmitted for approval.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

PDQ is very useful and one of the tools that we use a lot.

Incentivized

To be completely honest setting up a new ticketing system can be a pain in the ass. Once you have it setup and customized the way you want it, you don't want to switch unless you're unhappy with the product. Unless future releases and updates really muck the system up, I wouldn't change.

My renewal is soon coming up, it is fairly likely I will renew again for the 5th year. I may consider evaluating what else is out there, It was requested by my staff to not make a change. They feel that SSD fits our needs, is easy to use and should keep it.

Incentivized

Logical - If I want to do something with the software, it is quite clear on how I need to go about that. There isn't some weird process that is proprietary to just that vendor and is counterintuitive. What I want to see is displayed with just a couple clicks.

Incentivized

It has helped us a lot, and after some training and getting to know the product, we are quite comfortable with it and feel much more capable of understanding what's going on in our IT environment. The only reason it doesn't get a perfect score from me is that there is a learning curve for both end users and IT admins using ServiceNow. Once you customize the UI and remove unnecessary fields. You are left with a very clean product that does what it needs to and does it well.

Incentivized

Solarwinds Service Desk has a very "user friendly" interface. Everything looks nice and neat. And, learning how to use the system is very easy. It provides multiple services that are easy for most people to grasp, and allows for great organization of incidents and assets. Support for Solarwinds Service Desk has a good response and resolution time and are easy to work with.

Incentivized

We have never had any issues with ServiceNow's availability that I am aware of in the two years I have been using it.

Incentivized

Because the data is stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS) there are very rarely any outages. There have been some times when the product has been slow to load, but because the interface is web based it could be anything between my computer and AWS that was causing the issue. But also, because the application is web based it can be access from anywhere which makes it very convenient

Incentivized

For a massive system, page loads are reasonably quick, including searches.

Incentivized

When the system is working, the pages load very quickly. We run reports all the time in the system. The reporting can be extremely complex or very simple. Either way, we have not had any issues with the reports. We do not currently integrate Solarwinds Service Desk with any other software.

Incentivized

The built-in help menus and general ease of use render whatever systems support there might be almost irrelevant. There is stability in the system's simplicity; if you're in the position to use such a product, you're your own best friend. Simple web searches more often than not turn up the solution to any little niggles, such as what silent install switches specific applications require (a remarkably wide choice of options exist). System updates are timely and unobtrusive, installing in no time at all. Maybe I've just been lucky; if so, long may it continue!

Incentivized

I would give it this rating because we have had no major issues with the support for ServiceNow after we implemented it at our organization. They seem to respond promptly and efficiently if we ever do need to open a support case with them about an issue we are having.

Incentivized

SolarWinds support department will respond to you quickly from the time of purchase to after-purchase instructions & supporting, and the company is great in customers support. In buying a software, our organization always has a priority for the seller and support and accountability is very important to us, and the manufacturer or seller must be responsible and supportive.

To type in what should be a text box, you have to click an empty cell, a tiny text box pop up opens with a check box and an X. You the. Type in the text box and have to click the check mark. If you have a bunch of fields to fill out, doing this is very annoying. Absolutely know thought went in to this. I'm sure somebody in marketing thought it was a good idea. It wasn't.

When we first purchased Samanage (now Solarwinds) they provided us with an informational training session to show us all of the basics on how the service works and showed us everything we were interested in using. There are still some areas of Solarwinds that we do not yet utilize but I know if we choose to use them in the future we would be able to schedule another session with our representative to have them show us what we need to know.

Incentivized

Without exception, every client I have worked with has been very happy with their resulting product. While this is partly due to my work, I must point out that the platform is the winning decision, not the implementer.

Incentivized

The implementation process for our organization was fairly simple. We set up an email address to receive the emails from the system (for incident creation), and we allowed the system to spoof our IT email to respond to requests. Solarwinds helped us with the rest of the implementation, and it took less than a week to get the system fully operational.

Incentivized

This software was referred to us by an IT professional. Previously, we were installing the software with the help of remote desktop applications but it was very time consuming; it was wasting the user's time since he could not use his computer. After testing PDQ Deploy, we just never looked back.

Incentivized

We used to use Jira to handle service tickets but it's way too robust for something this straightforward. Due to the nature of Jira, you needed to already have a lot of documentation and knowledge about who should be assigned the ticket, so the lift of creating a ticket was time consuming.

Incentivized

We chose SolarWinds Service Desk for its user friendly platform compared to what we had. Its was easier for requestors to submit tickets, provide feedback, merge tickets, build a suitable approval process. Our organization had a hard time going back and forth with the end user on providing a status on their request or issue, where most users just didn't follow through or lost interest in their issue. We would have to send multiple emails to get any type of feedback and that's something we did not want to keep on doing.

Incentivized

ServiceNow works as an enterprise solution.

Incentivized

We have over 500 computers and tablets across our organization and this has helped us greatly in keeping track of where computers are and who is currently using it. I can see this product being useful to groups both larger and smaller than us and I really appreciate this product.

Incentivized

• Speed of deployment is very positive for new software setup, saving hours of testing and deployment locally
• Made patching for large computer estate very efficient, another positive for staff not having to spend hours of patching individual machines
• Works well for small team of IT's and again makes various repetitive tasks much easier

Incentivized

• We don't currently have a CMDB, so we are leveraging ServiceNow to build one using their ITSM and ITOM tools. This is a huge gap for us as a company and it will be a big win once this is in place.
• The core help desk functions are comparable to most other tools on the market, but SN does a great job of integrating that data with other modules like Problem, Change and Event Management to provide a truly integrated solution.
• The tool is expensive, so you will need to try to do as much as you can with the platform. We currently use other systems for HAM and SAM but will be including these in our ServiceNow instance in the future to help maximize our ROI.

Incentivized

• We are more easily able to quantify user satisfaction with support.
• We are able to develop SLAs that quantify and define the obligation of our support teams.
• The actual cost of Solarwinds Service Desk per agent user is high in our estimation. The more you implement this platform across your organization, the more tightly tethered you are to this solution.

Incentivized