ServiceDesk Plus is free help desk software from ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corporation.
$10
Starting Price Per Month
Zabbix
Score8.5 out of 10
N/A
Zabbix is an open-source network performance monitoring software. It includes prebuilt official and community-developed templates for integrating with networks, applications, and endpoints, and can automate some monitoring processes.
We use the free version, it allows up to 10 technicians to be added to the system, but that has never been an issue, as we are a small team. The functionality and usability of MESDP are great and can work with larger teams too. It is well suited to be used as a main Ticketing system, and this is not limited to IT only, I am sure other teams that need to keep track and log issues will be able to utilize MESDP without any issues. There is a self-service portal as an option, however, we do not use it as of yet, as there has not been the need for it. If you would need to use the same instance within multiple departments, this may be a bit tricky to achieve, as there is no easy way to limit visibility to tickets from other departments, however, I am sure there is a way around it.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Zabbix is great for monitoring your servers and seeing alerts when the system uses too much CPU or memory. This allowed the system Engineer to be proactive and add resources to these systems to avoid interrupting the services. Especially servers running operations applications and services. This is one of the best usages for Zabbix.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It is very easy to create business rules that automatically route email tickets to the correct department and apply templates to correctly categorize the incident.
The technician auto-assign function allows email tickets to be fairly apportioned using a round robin technique. We do not cuurently use the load balancing technique which is also available.
It is very easy to bulk edit requests to correct miscatergorization by Analysts. (i.e. Incidents vs. Service Requests)
Coordinating communications and notifying ticket holders when a network or application event is resolved is very simple.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Collecting hardware data - CPU, Memory, Network, and Disk Metrics are collected and reported on.
Flexible design - It is very easy to build out even very large environments via the templating system. You can also start where you are - network monitoring, server monitoring, etc. and then build it out from there as time and resources permit.
Provides a "plugin architecture" (via XML templates) to allow end users to extend it to monitor all kinds of equipment, software, or other metrics that are not already added into the software already.
Very complete documentation. Almost every aspect of Zabbix has been documented and reported on.
Cost - Zabbix is FOSS software and always free. Support is reasonably priced and readily available.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Reporting tools; the report features can be a little limited, it can be quite tricky to get the information you want displayed in detail
You can set required fields within the ticket template, which should mean the user has to complete them before they can submit the ticket, however this often doesn't enforce correctly
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Because this is the best tool, we have given ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus a rating of 9 out of 10 because it provides a good overall IT service management experience, especially for ticketing, asset management, automation, and reporting. It has helped us organize IT support processes and improve visibility. For ticketing.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
It is free. It didn't cost anything to implement (other than my time and the cost incurred for it) and it is filling a badly needed gap in our IT infrastructure. Support is available if we have issues and can be done annually or paid for on a per incident basis as needed. Expansion, updates, and all other future lifecycle activities are likewise free of cost, so as long as someone is able to implement/maintain the software (and the OSS project is maintained) then I imagine the company will never leave it.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
As any other feature-rich software package, starting out with ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus has a little bit of a learning curve, but it usually doesn't take very long until you can use the basic features. Training new technicians on the use of the software does not take very long, and for users to submit tickets it is as easy as sending an email.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I think every organization, especially the IT department, needs a tool like this. I know of another product like Zabbix that gives a similar or the same solution, but its range makes it very useful. You can see almost all the device info in one place: disk usage, disk space, network usage, etc.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I have a few issues with MESDP and even though we use the free version, the support staff was very quick to respond and extremely competent and helpful. Luckily, I have only had to use them a couple of times over the 2.5 years I have been using their product, but they strike me as very competent, friendly and helpful, regardless of the version of their product you use.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The setup is the most time-consuming portion of using zabbix. It takes a lot of effort to shape it into a usable format and even then it can get very messy. It's not exactly intuitive and as mentioned the UI seems a bit antiquated. If I was to roll out a monitoring solution from scratch, I'd probably look for alternatives which are easier to use and maintain.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We are a mainly Windows environment, so it would be useful if we could have used Active Directory to deploy agents. As of version 4.2, Zabbix has announced a new agent MSI file to allow exactly that. Unfortunately, we didn't have that option. Also, for Linux and MAC deployments, there is no simple way to deploy that. Using remote scripts you may be able to create something, but most places will opt for either SNMP (agentless) or manual installation of agents to add to Zabbix. A way of deploying agents via discovery would go a long way to helping in the adoption of the tool.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Spiceworks was free, which obviously had both benefits and limitations - I will say that the community around Spiceworks has always been great. If we could replicate that experience with the ME user base, it would be terrific.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We're using the Solarwinds suite as our global monitoring standard, but it is very complex and its licensing model makes it difficult to monitor a wide range of technologies. So, we're using Zabbix as a complement on our monitoring process. Zabbix is a way more flexible and has free integrations to a wide range of technologies. It is also more 'user friendly' and easy to manage.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The tool does not scale well from an ROI perspective. As you add a customer, you must add a new instance, hence a new license.
The tool is probably on the expensive side (34,000 USD per 130 technicians per year).
There is no usage beyond incident, change, and problem management. The CMDB feature is extremely limited and cannot generate additional ROI. There is no knowledge-base or integration with other software (other than ME Desktop Central).
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
