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December 10, 2020
We use Cherwell Service Management in our help desk department to create tickets for users who faces issues. Cherwell Service Management is our ITSM solution for the entire enterprise. We don't use the user-facing portal but we make use of the rest of the product as our primary IT help desk management and service management tool. We needed a help desk product that could be hosted outside, that could create tickets from emails and that could automate workflows for common IT support tasks and routine operations. We had tried using a home-grown solution and trialed a couple other solutions and ended up with Cherwell mostly due to my attraction to its "middleware" architecture and the way that architecture makes it easier for me to manage.
- Ticket managing
- Notifications
- Time tracking
- Should be better in browser version
- Overall UI/UX
December 09, 2020
Cherwell Service Management is used to track all the tickets created for incidents, change requests, and service inquires within the IT and Tech related sectors of our business. Anyone in the company has access to it from a ticket submission standpoint and managers and above have more in-depth access to the software to manage all of those requests in one place, get reporting, and monitor status/progress.
- Manages all issues and changes in one place..
- Great job of tracking and time management to resolution.
- Allows managers to quickly and easily see what is assigned to all members of their team and who's responsible for what.
- The user interface could definitely use some improvement.
- Lacks areas for descriptions of what teams handle which problems.
October 02, 2019
Cherwell Service Management is our ITSM solution for the entire enterprise. We don't use the user-facing portal but we make use of the rest of the product as our primary IT help desk management and service management tool. We needed a help desk product that could be hosted outside, that could create tickets from emails and that could automate work flows for common IT support tasks and routine operations. We had tried using a home-grown solution and trialed a couple other solutions and ended up with Cherwell mostly due to my attraction to its "middleware" architecture and the way that architecture makes it easier for me to manage. When Cherwell applies version updates on their hosted server, things don't break because its only the underlying middleware layer that updates such that all of our customizations are unaffected.
- 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.
- Cherwell's sales staff could use some improvement in the "paying attention to the little guy" area. It's true that sales people are focused on their larger potential commissions, and that is understandable, but as a small business, we were treated less than well by our Cherwell salesman. I would go so far as to say that he neglected us after we made the purchase and had a very serious complaint about what he sold us. We were sold a product without any implementation plan or package. I found out that we were probably the only customer that had this happen, but I wanted to mention t because it was huge headache to implement the product without any implementation help from the vendor.
- I think Cherwell could do a better job of keeping their USA-based hosted server farm in better working order. Their infrastructure maintenance is improving and it doesn't affect Cherwell customers that host their own on-prem Cherwell servers, but for a long while they had a lot of failures at their on-demand server farm in Denver where they host instance for the US market. We would show up in the morning and our help desk technicians couldn't login for a couple of hours. They got these issues resolved quickly enough I suppose, within a few hours. And they did upgrade their Denver datacenter about a year ago and done better at maintaining it. But we literally can't do our jobs without Cherwell working as it s our primary help desk and end-user management tool.
Cherwell is being used by our managed services department to assist with our several practices (intel, Power I-series, Power AIX, networking, Converged (Compute)).
Our management accesses it here and there for KPI and other important metrics. We also create customized customer dashboards for use on the self-service portal. Beyond that, we also generate ticket reports for our SDMs and other customer relations employees.
Our management accesses it here and there for KPI and other important metrics. We also create customized customer dashboards for use on the self-service portal. Beyond that, we also generate ticket reports for our SDMs and other customer relations employees.
- Incident Management
- Change Management
- Problem Management
- The Web UI
- Overall UIX
- CMDB
November 15, 2019
Cherwell Service Management tool is used by our entire corporation for two reasons:
1. Service Request/Incident management
2. Change request management
It allows users to log IT service requests/incidents and track their statuses.
1. Service Request/Incident management
2. Change request management
It allows users to log IT service requests/incidents and track their statuses.
- Allows users to submit structured and clear service request or incident report tickets.
- Easy to see all updates and track work done on the ticket.
- Slow overall performance.
- Not all search parameters available in dashboard creation option.
October 07, 2019
Cherwell is the framework for the ITSM/ITIL initiative in the organization. It's being used a the system for Incident, Problem, Change management and it is expanding as the Configuration Item and Knowledge management.
- Incident Management.
- Change Management.
- Integrating with other systems.
- Web front end.
- Unified client.
- Support for web technologies.
October 07, 2019
We use Cherwell for both Incident Management and Change Management. It's only across the entire organization because of requests to the helpdesk.
- Standard Change Templates - importing existing templates is quite easy, and nominating new Normal changes into a template is a great easy process as well.
- Saved searches - When the reports don't quite give you what you need, searches are wonderful! Using the search function also gives a better depth of knowledge into what fields belong to which places in the database.
- Support requests - this has been a great way for our IT guys to resolve "customer" issues quickly and in some semblance of order.
- Back-end workflows need to speed up. Some of them seem very slow.
- Aesthetics - viewing on some of the dashboards cuts the words off, which makes it difficult to use those graphs for reporting purposes.
- I don't really have a third option - I haven't used the software quite that long yet.
October 03, 2019
Cherwell Service Management is used as our ITSM tool to support clients of the Division of IT. We utilize Cherwell for may functions including Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Knowledge, and CMDB. Over the years we have continually expanded the use to cover new organizational needs.
- Customization: Cherwell allows us to create custom solutions that address the specific challenges we face. From a very simple "feedback" form with a single text field to a more complex process with approvals allowing users to update information about their Configuration Items.
- Integration: We pull data into the Cherwell system through various sources and different methods. We might use API calls to a web application to retrieve data, or directly connect to a database.
- Cherwell currently has a sort of split system with an "Application" on one side and "Content" on the other. This is one of the greatest strengths because it enables deep customization to the "Content" while allowing new features and upgrades to the "Application" without causing disruption. Over the years, Cherwell has added great improvements to the Out-of-the-Box "Content" and the "Application" and while you can easily upgrade the "Application" side to gain the new features it provides, upgrading the "Content" is a much bigger challenge. Cherwell is very aware of this challenge, and is working to solve it, but the more you customize your "Content" the more difficult it is to pull in new features.
October 03, 2019
Cherwell is helping us to implement several ITIL processes and improve our service delivery. Our vision is to look beyond IT service management and expand and explore Enterprise Service Management and use this tool as a central hub for all staff to come for help for the various service our organization provides.
- Capturing all of the activities involved in managing incidents in an easy to navigate way.
- The ability to link incidents, problem and change requests to configuration items in the CMDB.
- On steps to automate various business processes to eliminate manual processes.
- Ease of upgrades and content.
- Report writing.
- Dashboard creation.
Cherwell is used within the IT department, across Service Desk, Desktop Management, IT Business Services, Information Security, Infrastructure, and Systems Administration. It tracks service requests, incidents, and changes.
- Customization - if you can think it (and have time to develop it) you can do it.
- Good ITSM solution OOTB and can be implemented quickly for most common needs.
- Good user group and customer engagement.
- Mobile app.
- Responsive design/ADA.
- Calling customer support.
We use it to manage it, finance, facilities, onboarding. it has reduced the amount of time it takes for us to onboard and to manage the creation of new users.
- Customizable.
- No code.
- Easy to use.
- Software is buggy.
- It's quirky.
February 18, 2020
We use it as our primary ticketing system between our different IT departments to allow us effectively communicate and pass along problems.
- It has a lot of flexibility in terms of dashboard customization.
- You can customize ticket workflows to send them to particular teams in order.
- Effective use of metrics to make sure you are hitting your deadlines.
- It isn't the best looking application overall.
- It can be finicky when it comes to customization. You have to spend some time to get the results you are looking for.
- Some of the navigation can be a bit confusing, using search function can sometimes be more difficult due to the level of granularity they want.
Cherwell is used extensively throughout the organization so that users can log service requests for Human Resources. For the Information Technology department, it is used for service delivery and asset management.
It is able to direct requests that are made to the correct team and manage massive inventories of stock with most of this being done without the need for any programming skills.
It is able to direct requests that are made to the correct team and manage massive inventories of stock with most of this being done without the need for any programming skills.
- Service requests.
- Incident management.
- Process scheduling is fiddly.
- Word wrapping during text entry sometimes does not happen properly. You need to pop out the text box to see it properly.
December 11, 2019
We are using Cherwell SM across the organization to address all the operational tickets that we will be receiving on a daily basis. The support team and all the other high-level engineers using the CSM as a one-stop portal to have a clear outline of the organizational ticketing dashboard and also to access all the knowledge-base articles.
- Easy to navigate.
- All-in-one console.
- Multiple sequences.
- Connectivity issues on the back end system (for on-prem installations).
February 06, 2020
Our Project Managers, Consultants, and Accounts Payable departments use Cherwell Service Management to track service engagements for our customers.
- Tracking hours
- Tracking multiple tasks on an engagement
- Dashboard function
- Screen displays
October 03, 2019
We are using Cherwell in one department fully now, implementing in another. We are Working towards full implementation across all departments, including Billing, HR, Sales, Help Desk, Software Support, Backup, Security, etc. We have problems with disjointed departments all using different platforms in order to service our customers and partners.
- Ease of development.
- High level of customization.
- Great training platform.
- Ease of implementation.
- Some system performance and stability issues need to be addressed.
July 20, 2019
Cherwell Service Management is being used as an ITSM platform for the management of the incident, change, problem, knowledge, and CMDB. It is being used by IT only to support the rest of the organization and outside customers. Its key strength is its capabilities for multi-tenant, concurrent license, automation, and integration with other platforms. It acts as a one-stop-shop for all ITSM functions.
- Customization: Cherwell is a platform, so it can be built to do anything you can think of. However, you will require significant development resources.
- Automation: there are vast capabilities for automation and integration with other platforms. Of course, significant DevOps capabilities are required.
- Unlike some other ITSM tools, it has everything, such as knowledgebase, project management, CMDB, and integrations.
- Cherwell is slow. Very very slow. This is somewhat understandable because it is a very complex tool and a lot of things are happening in the tool, but it still needs to be a lot faster. It takes over 7 seconds to load an incident. The web client is faster, but it doesn't have all the features of the rich client (installs locally).
- Absolutely terrible UI: there's a left search pane, a right search pane, and a whole bunch of tabs at the bottom. What you get in the end is a screen that is divided into many small sections, and each section has large contents inside them so that you have to scroll left/right and up/down for many of them. It's the worst UI I have ever seen. Now add this to the slow speed mentioned earlier, and all your users hate it.
December 07, 2018
We used Cherwell as our central IT ticket tracking system across the entire university. It was also used in a minor setting to track room usage by some departments, but its main function was IT ticket submission. We had several positions (help desk phone calls, lab technicians, etc) that used Cherwell portals we designed to submit issues only, and these issues would escalate where appropriate to other departments like ours.
Cherwell addressed the void we had of not having a central tracking system for IT issues. We used to only use emails for work assignment and tracking for all faculty and student IT problems. This was meant to replace that entirely.
Cherwell addressed the void we had of not having a central tracking system for IT issues. We used to only use emails for work assignment and tracking for all faculty and student IT problems. This was meant to replace that entirely.
- After proper training on setting up the views and servers, Cherwell did a good job separating various department ownership of tickets. Our work views weren't cluttered with irrelevant information.
- There is a lot of information that can be embedded into tickets. Such as sub-task assignments that could contain almost the same information as a ticket itself. Lot of customization options.
- Custom personal dashboards were nice, once I figured out how to do it. Not everyone wants to see things the same way as other people, and being able to move touch points where you want is always a plus.
- While I understand that a lot of customization can be up to an organization, the platform was always a huge pain when going beyond the installed client. The web client and mobile app were very problematic and clunky, locked up frequently.
- My university was 50% Windows/50% Apple, and there's no Apple client.
- The built in remote control capabilities on tickets for client machines didn't play well with our active directory. We always just used a different program.
- Error handling could have been much better. Accidentally assigning ticket items to "non-existent" resources could crash the client. Such as if the resource was removed before a worker's view was refreshed.
- Tickets can go into limbo very easily, and seemed to require more development than it should to protect us from doing that. This is because there's a lot of different ways to do the same thing. Too many touch points all over the place in the UI.
- Too many ticket priority options. Clients could be assigned personal higher priorities through VIP status, tickets could be given their own priorities that conflict with client status, and SLA deadlines could assign other conflicting priorities. There were more but these were the most problematic if you're using Cherwell in a situation where you have limited developer time to nail down all the inconsistencies every day.
- There was an arbitrary time tracking feature on tickets that attempted to gather data on how long certain resources took, but because the UI was very cumbersome this was more of a pain to do and was very inaccurate of the actual work it takes to do certain things.
November 28, 2018
Cherwell is used mostly by our various Information Technology teams, as well as a few other departments that are project-based. It has solved several business problems, such as the process for when a new employee starts, when someone leaves, or changes positions. The tasks that are implemented in Cherwell allow for several technicians to work on one problem that involves many pieces. We hope to eventually use it for ongoing projects as well.
- Allow a ticket to be put on pending when it can't be resolved within the SLA
- Create a task for when another technician needs to assist with the ticket, for something out
- Allow you to email customers through portal without giving your personal email out
- Sometimes comments made on a ticket do not generate emails to the technician who owns it, and they will not know there is an update from the customer without checking it
- Sometimes I will see an error pop up when copying text but it can easily be closed
- Sometimes the time-out window for staying logged in does not appear on top of other applications so I will not know it's logging me out
We use Cherwell Service Management in our organization to manage Help Desk tickets and assign them to the appropriate group and person in our IT Department. Cherwell Service Management is also used to track computer and other IT Services property inventory, where it is, who has it, the costs that are associated with it.
- Ticket Tracking
- Asset Management
- Communication between IT Groups
- Sometimes it can be slow
- The search function can be confusing
- Editing of email templates is not easily apparent
November 29, 2017
Cherwell was used across our entire organization as a method to address user help tickets and to organize our service desk. It helped create a workflow so that help tickets were properly routed and flagged depending on severity, collecting all of the proper information and details. It also helped create an organized service desk website so that users could adequately find the information they needed, reducing labor on our end, while also alerting us of common problems so that we could increase efforts on our end to provide enough information to users so those problems didn't arise as much.
- Cherwell's ticketing system does a great job of following a designated workflow. Consistency is important for any organization.
- Cherwell allows for customized workspaces, so a user can see the things that are relevant to them. This cuts down on time it would take to sort through tickets in order to find what is relevant to a particular user.
- Cherwell would often crash, both on logging in or in the middle of entering a ticket. This was extremely difficult and time-consuming on my end.
- While it was possible to customize a workspace, the method for doing so was not intuitive.
- There was not a large help or training source to draw from in order to better oneself at Cherwell.
The Wisconsin DNR uses Cherwell as an Agency underneath the primary organization - the Wisconsin DOA. It is used throughout enterprise IT, but implemented only in that capacity, and is not used by all technology support groups within the DNR. We are striving to get to full usage of all available implemented features, but are not quite there yet.
- Automated workflows are done very well. There is a broad and configurable set of automations available, which allow for effective incident routing.
- Reporting is very flexible with all the options available, dashboards and graphing in an automated manner can be an effective delivery or ITIL reports.
- Web based clients allow for some good basic functionality, which are good for customers, or end users.
- Within our deployment model of Cherwell, there are core functional pieces that have to be configured at the top level, rather than the sub levels, which make some areas difficult to manage. For example, if one agency wants to use feature x in one way, but another agency wants to configure the same feature in a different way, then consensus has to be gained first. Its not as fully flexible in the base configuration space as would be ideal.
- Automated email processes, especially in the volumes that the State of Wisconsin goes through require some tweaking to allow them to fire in an effective way. We sometimes see problems with backlogs of these.
- Licensing based on concurrency and usage is a very modern approach, however, it leads to challenges in how customers use it. For example, we have automated log-off's in place for the local clients in order to manage our own usage, to maintain reasonable costs.
September 12, 2017
Cherwell tickets are created via email or call from hospital departments. Specific resources are then created a task within the Cherwell ticket. Detailed information is then supplied within the Cherwell ticket, once the ticket/task has been closed, an email is then sent to the initial requestor who requested the ticket to be created. Also time tracking is added with the Cherwell ticket.
- The Cherwell application has multiple processes to supply the requested information and the resolved information.
- Time Tracking is added, the cost can then be submitted to the hospital.
- Documentation can also be uploaded within the assigned ticket, to supply information to other tasked resources.
- The application is very good.
- This weekend the current version was upgraded.
- Senior management can supply full information of the time tracking with the associated ticket numbers.
Cherwell is used by the Information Technology department at Calvin College as our Information Technology Service Management tool. At this point, Calvin Information Technology is the sole user of the software, but there are plans to expand the usage across the organization in the future. Cherwell replaced our outdated solution we had been using that was hampering our communication and causing many process mis-steps.
- Offers a great ITIL framework out of the box
- Allows for a lot of customization and hooks into other software
- Sets up an out-of-the-box process for a ticket lifecycle if you don't have a process already set
- Creating and running reports is ridiculously, impossibly complex and complicated
- The product is so open-ended it's almost too broad. We have ended up creating a lot of in-house customizations to the product that would have been nice to have out of the box.
- Dashboards are great to have but they are awful in implementation. They are not dynamic and act more like a Bitmap file made in Windows 95 Microsoft Paint than a dynamic webpage. It would be nice if Dashboards were dynamic and were more like HTML or a web-based platform. It doesn't make sense why web design products like WIX exist yet the dashboards are needlessly complicated and have static image borders, sizes, etc.
Cherwell SaaS solution replaced our older on-premise ITSM tool (which shall remain nameless!). We did an initial roll-out of only Incident & Service Request and only in two of our regions around the world but have plans to get all IT teams and all main modules of Cherwell deployed. Currently the Cherwell tool is being used to resolve Service requests and is used by IT Support and Escalation groups (Apps, Infrastructure, etc) in support of that objective. Soon we'll build a Customer Portal and take the tool globally.
- Configuration is easy and doesn't require expensive consultants to do every little thing you need to adjust. I'm able to make minor and even major enhancements by myself. I find the development UI mostly intuitive.
- The amount of things we can automate in our Support department using Cherwell is wonderful. We've not yet taken full advantage of this but are excited at the possibilities. From automatically creating and classifying tickets to responding to customers with specific attachments they need, Cherwell is going to help us eliminate wasted time.
- Designing with Blueprints is an intelligent and efficient way to add new functionality to your Cherwell instance without all of the risk. Rollback files make it easy to "undo" any mistakes. This also allows you to develop in one environment and apply your Blueprints to the Production environment once fully tested.
- During my time working on the Cherwell implementation and subsequent modifications, I've noticed some 'out of the box bugs' that I'd like to see corrected in future versions of Cherwell. Some are simple oversights. Examples include leaving the Last Name out of the default Grid for the Customer table and some issues with the SLA date fields being set correctly in some cases.
- Cherwell really needs a distributed data center model so global customers can run a single SaaS instance and whose remote teams can connect to their nearest Cherwell server. Our teams in France and the USA currently connect to one Cherwell server in the UK and the performance/latency for our folks furthest away from the server could be better.
- The documentation could certainly be expanded upon. It does a good job explaining what everything is but doesn't go into enough detail to help you understand how to use it. Examples could be included at the bottom to help readers understand the content and how to apply it.
Cherwell Service Management Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
What is Cherwell Service Management?
Cherwell Service Management is designed for organizations seeking large reductions in software license spending, IT overhead, and software audit risk. By integrating all the data related to hardware and software inventory, application usage, license entitlements, and IT purchases, users can track and manage IT investments from purchase to retirement and abandon Excel spreadsheets.
Categories: IT Service Management (ITSM)
Cherwell Service Management Competitors
IBM Control Desk, ServiceNow IT Service Management, Axios Assyst, CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager, Hornbill Supportworks ITSM, Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite, BMC Helix ITSM (Remedy), Ivanti Service Manager (powered by Heat)
Cherwell Service Management Technical Details
| Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application: | No |