Cherwell Service Management Reviews

Cherwell is a good choice for any sized enterprise that needs an extremely customizable IT help desk solution that triggers (again, entirely customizable) automated actions, spawns workflows (and auto-spawns tasks and sub-tasks for them) for multiple IT technicians and multiple tiers of technicians. It can do project management, change management, asset management, all the same things that the others can do and far, far more. If you do NOT need a highly customized help desk solution and if you don't need automated workflow creation and task tracking, then you could buy a less expensive solution that you can use out of the box without any of the frills. But as I said, Cherwell can do a lot more than just IT help desk, and it has a huge array of "plug-in" / "add-on" features, most of which are free, that make every Cherwell implementation completely unique to the enterprise that uses it. Cherwell is just right for a company that wants to manage and customize the help desk application with a PTE resource. I manage it myself at my company, and I spend very little time maintaining it now that it's solidly established ... although it's so much fun to customize that I wish I had more time to add new features and play with it. I do strongly advise some training for the admins ... your Cherwell admins MUST take the online, instructor-led introductory admin class to kick you off, and you MUST have implementation help from Cherwell to setup your instance, especially their hosted offering, over which you don't have database admin control (you can't even turn it on to get it working without their help). But after that, there is very little support needed from your own in-house Cherwell admin resource, unless, of course, you are constantly growing the solution to make it do more. I can see how that could happen because Cherwell can do almost anything. I can imagine some departments wanting to make it into the swiss-army-knife of IT .. and HR .. and facilities .... and physical security ... and you could spend many hours down the rabbit hole doing that if you wanted to.

Well-suited:
To provide solid incident management between your service desk and customers.
To provide Change management to assist executives and overall business up-time. Help detect change collision while looking at scheduled change times and CIs upstream/downstream.

Less appropriate:
The overall reporting features are very non-user-friendly and it can be a bit of a pain to actually get the data out that you're looking for.

It is well suited for the Customer Service Portal and Customer Service Fulfillment along with Change Management. The framework allows you easily to grow out of IT.

I am still going to praise the standard template process. it's great! Using an existing approved Normal change, and nominating it into a standard template is quite easy. The only thing that could be easier is having an easy view of which templates are awaiting approval. I had to create a saved search for that.

Cherwell is great for logic and process-based situations where you want "X" to occur when "Y" happens to "Z".

I like the ability to segregate high sensitive data from the general database, especially for meeting federal regulatory requirements.

Cherwell is suited to routine workflows, service request management, and HelpDesk management.

It's great for automating processes.

Cherwell would work great within the managed services space, as well as internal departments. It has the ability to be highly customizable between different types of users and departments, so there are a significant amount of issues that it could address. Overall, the home-run hit is in-house usage within an organization.

Cherwell is extremely powerful and cost-effective, thanks to its rich feature set. It can also be said that support from the vendor is also great. This makes it suitable for a very large and multi-tenant environment that requires a lot of customization, automation, and integration. This assumes that you have a lot of smarts and talent to develop and administer the tool.

Well suited if you have people dedicated to developing the views and back-end C# client, and if you work in a more silo type environment.

Cherwell is good at tracking tickets put in by customers for short and longterm use. It is easy to close a ticket quickly when you are finished, but some tickets will take longer and that's what the pending status is for.

Cherwell may not be suited for longterm projects, ones that take months or over a year to accomplish. Our team hasn't integrated the feature yet so I can't speak on how well it works.

I think if you have the time to spend making this product into what you want and adapt it to your environment you will be in a really good place. If you are looking for a purely out of the box solution it might not be the best product for you.

It makes it easy to ticket track with our IT Department. Cherwell Service Management ties into our helpdesk email account, so whenever someone sends an email to our helpdesk, a ticket is automatically created, classified, and the user gets an automatic response saying that their request has been received and it should be resolved shortly.

I think it's great if you want to track simple incidents and tasks for workers. It's a great tool for management if workers have access to technology when they are working. It is harder for employees who do not carry personal devices with them or have to track down a computer to resolve or track journal notes.

Cherwell is well-suited to an IT organization who is looking for ways to organize their service catalog and make their ticketing system more efficient. It's good for large organizations with several different departments who have to interact with one another. It provides the ability to link within the system, so the paper trail it provides it very beneficial.

Change Management approval processing is a good example. Cherwell, as an ITSM tool, is effective at executing the different change configurations, and requiring distinct approvals to proceed forwards.

I would say Cherwell is best suited to an organization that needs to create a process for taking in and bringing work tickets through a process that has struggled with implementing a process. Cherwell can be bent to an existing process, but it's going to take a lot of customization and work. Cherwell works best if you adapt to its out-of-the-box process, which may be difficult if you already are working within a set standard of procedures and process and Ticket lifecycle.

For a global company like ours where support teams are geographically dispersed and maintaining on-premise infrastructure is losing ground to offloading to the cloud, the SaaS aspect of Cherwell makes it ideal. We configured the 'core' implementation and can now easily add other support teams around the world with a few additions to some system tables and purchasing some additional licenses. Incorporating specific needs for other teams is easy to do in Cherwell and can be done without compromising the integrity of the entire instance.

If you are a single consolidated IT group it will excel for you as a ticketing system. The asset management portion could be a little more robust, but again this could be in relation to the interface of the product/version we are using. If you are a decentralized IT group then another platform may be better suited.

Cherwell can be built for literally anything. I can't think of a single area it wouldn't make sense. It is built on top of a data driven infrastructure that is highly configurable and can meet the needs of anything you can think of. Tracking phone calls, ordering of services, and reporting out all of those metrics are easy.

We greatly appreciate Cherwell as our main ticketing system in IT.

Cherwell is great at the basic ITSM/ITIL processes and transactional type ticketing that occurs within CSM or Facilities management. We would like to utilize the tool more for Project management within IT and start to promote it beyond but the out of the box module is not robust enough to be solely used. Integration with specialized tools is the current method and is acceptable.