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Cherwell Service Management

Cherwell Service Management

Overview

What is Cherwell Service Management?

Cherwell Software was founded by the former CEO of FrontRage Solutions and is a full suite of service management tools competing with BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, and IBM SmartCloud.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Cherwell is a versatile IT service management tool that has been widely adopted by various organizations across industries. Users have …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

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  • Organize and prioritize service tickets (52)
    10.0
    100%
  • Self-service tools (51)
    9.8
    98%
  • ITSM reports and dashboards (51)
    9.7
    97%
  • ITSM collaboration and documentation (48)
    9.6
    96%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Unavailable

What is Cherwell Service Management?

Cherwell Software was founded by the former CEO of FrontRage Solutions and is a full suite of service management tools competing with BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, and IBM SmartCloud.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://pages.cherwell.com/pricing.csm.…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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ServiceNow is a fast-growing service management provider that went public in 2012. Built on the ServiceNow Now Platform, the IT Service Management bundle provides an agent workspace with knowledge management, and modules supporting issue tracking and problem resolution, change, release and…

What is Atera?

Atera is a platform that enables IT professionals to gain access, visibility, and control over all their networks and devices from anywhere. Users can manage their IT operation from patch management, IT automations, advanced reporting, alerts, helpdesk, ticketing, and it features dozens of…

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Product Demos

Cherwell 8 Overview

YouTube

Cherwell Service Management 10.0 Demo

YouTube
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Features

Incident and problem management

Streamlining ticketing and service restoration processes

9.7
Avg 8.1

ITSM asset management

Managing all IT assets and enforcing policy rules

9.8
Avg 8.2

Change management

Ensuring standardized processes for making changes to IT infrastructure

9.9
Avg 8.4
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Product Details

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.

Cherwell Service Management Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Cherwell Software was founded by the former CEO of FrontRage Solutions and is a full suite of service management tools competing with BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, and IBM SmartCloud.

ServiceNow IT Service Management, IFS Assyst, and CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager are common alternatives for Cherwell Service Management.

Reviewers rate Organize and prioritize service tickets highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Cherwell Service Management are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(107)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Cherwell is a versatile IT service management tool that has been widely adopted by various organizations across industries. Users have reported positive experiences with the software, citing its customizable GUI and flexible reporting capabilities. One of the key use cases of Cherwell is in the realm of ITSM and ITIL initiatives. It is utilized for incident management, problem management, change management, configuration item management, and knowledge management. The software helps organizations streamline their IT processes and improve service delivery by providing a centralized platform for managing tickets, tracking incidents and problems, and facilitating knowledge sharing among team members.

Additionally, Cherwell extends beyond ITSM to address other organizational needs. It is used as a ticketing system for various departments such as HR, facilities, and IT support. Users leverage Cherwell to handle service requests, facilities management tasks, new hire requests, and even training participation tracking. The software's highly customizable nature allows it to be adapted to different workflows and business processes, making it a valuable tool in areas beyond traditional IT functions.

Another notable use case of Cherwell is its role in improving communication and collaboration within organizations. Users have highlighted how Cherwell serves as a central tracking system for IT issues, replacing inefficient methods like email-based work assignment. By providing real-time tracking and metrics, Cherwell enhances accountability and promotes institutional collaboration among different departments.

Overall, Cherwell's ease of use and wide range of applications have made it an essential tool for organizations seeking effective IT service management, streamlined workflows, improved communication, and high-quality customer service across various departments.

Extensive Customization Options: Many users have praised Cherwell's extensive customization options, allowing them to personalize dashboards and move touch points according to their preferences. This flexibility has been appreciated by several reviewers who value the ability to tailor the system to their specific needs.

Efficient Automation Capabilities: Several users have highlighted Cherwell's automation capabilities, mentioning that it has allowed them to automate various tasks in their support department. From ticket creation and classification to responding with specific attachments, this automation feature has helped eliminate wasted time and improve overall efficiency.

Easy Configuration Process: Numerous users have mentioned that Cherwell's configuration process is easy to navigate without requiring expensive consultants for every adjustment. They appreciate being able to make minor as well as major enhancements on their own, giving them more control over the system's configuration.

Web and Mobile App Issues: Users have reported various issues with the web client and mobile app, including frequent locking up and clunkiness. These problems significantly hinder their workflow and productivity.

Lack of Apple Client: In environments that use a mix of Windows and Apple devices, some users have experienced difficulties due to the lack of an Apple client. This absence creates compatibility challenges and limits their ability to effectively utilize the software.

Issues with Active Directory Integration: The built-in remote control capabilities on tickets do not work well with active directory, causing problems for users. This issue disrupts their ability to efficiently manage tickets and collaborate with other team members.

Users commonly recommend the following when using Cherwell:

  1. Utilize all the available features, such as workflows and customizations, to increase productivity and resolve IT and system-related issues effectively.

  2. Take time for proper implementation and customization by conducting a hands-on proof of concept (POC) to understand customization needs, considering the implementation process and ease of system configuration, and allowing enough time for implementation and user acceptance testing (UAT).

  3. Seek support from the Cherwell community by attending user groups and seeking guidance during the implementation process.

Overall, users recommend fully utilizing Cherwell's features, dedicating sufficient time for implementation, customization, and training, and seeking advice from the Cherwell community for successful use of the software.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-50 of 56)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
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.
Richie Ritter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Cherwell is great for logic and process-based situations where you want "X" to occur when "Y" happens to "Z".
Voncia Molock | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
I like the ability to segregate high sensitive data from the general database, especially for meeting federal regulatory requirements.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
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.
Jane Updegraff | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 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.
October 02, 2019

Cherwell Review

Catherine Stevens | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Cherwell is suited to routine workflows, service request management, and HelpDesk management.
October 01, 2019

Cherwell Rocks!

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
  • Incident Management
  • Change Management
  • Problem Management
  • The Web UI
  • Overall UIX
  • CMDB
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.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Robbie Speers | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used campus wide. We use it mainly to manage/tracking technology and physical facilities incidents and delegation of work..
  • I really like that when repetitive requests come in we can create a problem ticket and then communicate with all requesters under one incident.
  • I like the flexibility in being able to add journal notes, assign tasks and one having one place to look for all information on a project. It's simple but I like that we can attach documents.
  • I would like to see more project management aspects incorporated. The ability to track progress on a timeline/graph. We've customized a template for office moves but are limited in the number of steps it will track before I need to add another incident.
  • I want the contact information to be more robust so that multiple people can be added to an incident and e-mailed at once instead of having to type in names in emails over and over again.
  • Resolution description is buried in the e-mail template that we send.
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.
Andrew Breyen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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.
Naomi Hagelund | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
November 09, 2017

Well Supported

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Cherwell to manage our IT service and support functions across our organization. We have several sites, and each site is supported by a local team. Cherwell allows our company to identify and track issues at the local level, as well as escalate items to the corporate level for centralized functions such as application development and security.
  • Easy for users to create a help desk ticket for support, and receive automated progress updates.
  • Easy for support staff to consolidate all open tickets, both by site as well as by issue type to identify incidents that could be related across multiple locations.
  • Well integrated with Active Directory services.
  • Cherwell offers more functionality than we are currently taking advantage of, which sometimes makes the support interface appear bloated.
Cherwell is great for organizations with multiple sites that want to automate assigning tickets to local support teams. The dashboard provides critical visibility to workload and response time, which can be very valuable to the team. Cherwell seamlessly provides a single point of contact for users to get support for all of their IT needs - hardware, applications, network, and security.
September 12, 2017

Cherwell Service Management

Steve Blinston | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.

The Cherwell Service Management application is installed within Citrix, this is then available for all TransForm SSO resources to resolve any requested issues or service requests. Hospital resources can connect to the Cherwell Service Management website and supply information for the incident or service request

Within the Cherwell Service Management Application, the Record Details supply the Record Type; Service Type; Priority 1 to 5 and scheduled date to be completed.

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used to track tickets and incidents company-wide in an IT setting. It allows us to track incidents, requests, and anything else that could come our way. It also provides stats for a bunch of different stats including follow-ups, requester, request time taken, and allows for additional training.
  • Simple once configured
  • Many possibilities for data
  • Easy for users
  • Very resource intensive
  • Can be overwhelming at first
  • Reporting can be a bit wonky at times
The main use of Cherwell would be to watch productivity at a high level and use that to inform new business ventures or IT ventures. If you just [need to] see the data without finding the root causes of incidents then it could be a waste of time and money. Luckily we have great admins that are able to help with this data.
February 15, 2017

Great Process Builder

Michael J Mandeville | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used for incident, problem and service request management throughout the State of Oklahoma's IT departments. It aids the state in tracking requests and service levels.
  • The dashboards are amazing.
  • It is easily configured to meet your needs.
  • The reporting/searching capability is easy to use and available to all users.
  • The Service Catalog in the Customer Portal is not very user-friendly.
  • The method of making configuration changes and migrating them to production is single threaded sometimes, makes it hard to make several changes at once.
Well Suited - The dashboards and configuration are very well done. It follows ITIL practices very well.
Evan Miller | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
[We are] currently utilizing Cherwell primarily as a ticketing/ticket tracking system with some minor asset management roles tied into it. It is being used by the IT department as a whole across our entire organization. It helps to ensure prompt response times and accountability among IT employees that are assigned particular issues.
  • Ticket Handling and routing. Being a larger organization getting tickets routed to the proper internal groups to resolve is key.
  • Maintaining level of service. Without any ticketing system we would be hard pressed to keep track independently of issues/calls/emails received.
  • Asset management. Utilizing a web link to inventory new equipment assignments aids in troubleshooting with users as the equipment is bound to their userid. So when a ticket is generated for their ID a snapshot of what equipment they have and possibly are calling about is presented.
  • The interface is somewhat clunky to navigate and at times finding where things are located takes some time.
  • If you are idle too long in the application it will constantly pop up a message that you have been logged out due to inactivity but you cannot then close the application without having to end the task from the task manager in Windows.
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Currently Cherwell is being used just in the service desk. This has greatly improved the effectiveness of the service in handling incidents and outages. Several other teams are starting to look at the project tracking portion of Cherwell. We aim to get all of infrastructure using this tool.
  • Incident management is clear and easy to use. The business specific changes that were made, were easy to complete.
  • A great web portal.
  • Updates push out upon logging into the client.
  • Problem management text messaging reports are not great.
  • I wish Cherwell had more Mapps.
Any service desk would benefit from Cherwell. Any business that is looking for a tool that will support many teams' IT or not, would benefit from Cherwell. If a company already had several tools in place across many teams, it could be difficult to completely implement this across the business.
Jeremy Spindler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used by our IT department as our main ticketing system and for certain call-center duties. Beginning to explore use cases for non-IT departments on campus, including mandatory training participation tracking, HR workflow tracking, etc.
  • One-Steps are easy to create use and save so much time!
  • We used majority out-of-the-box Cherwell features, and didn't need to spend time developing it ourselves.
  • Because Cherwell has so many out-of-the-box tools, some development options are limited to what is already provided
We greatly appreciate Cherwell as our main ticketing system in IT.
Kevan Welsh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Cherwell for Incident, Problem, Knowledge, and Project management, as well as as for our HR and Facilities teams. It keeps everyone in sync with all of the compartments of IT, HR, and Facilities, tracks anything we can think of, and allows for flexible reporting to leadership as whenever necessary.
  • Blueprints and One-Steps all for maximum flexibility and endless possibilities. Password resets, account onboarding/offboarding automation, self-service portal, and many many more.
  • Form building allows virtually endless possibilities for capturing data from end users or technicians alike. Publish them in the client, the web client, or the portal and help gather requirements from the beginning to ensure efficient use of resources.
  • Report building is very easy and configurable. Build customer variables, charts, graphs, matrices, and more without having to know any coding languages.
  • The performance of the system seems process heavy. Often takes a while to load specific screens.
  • Out of the box features on upgrades seem inconsistent on when and where they are applied for fear of overwriting previous custom work done in the system.
  • Organization of one-steps could use some work. Certain folders can only be accessed from particular regions of the orange or blue pills.
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.
February 03, 2017

I don't Code, I Cherwell

Brandon Joseph | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We've started to use Cherwell Service Management in the last year, as our old IT ticketing system didn't have the complexity we needed in today's IT world. We use it for incident reporting, service requests, and are phasing in change management; we've used it internally for our own tracking, and are just starting the phasing in so our end users can start filling in their own tickets.
  • Excellent tracking and reporting
  • Allows customers to enter in their own tickets
  • Allows analysis of where our problem points are in resolving incidents
  • Helps us better manage change requests
  • Initial set up, if you are not familiar with service catalogs can be painful. The out of the box suggested ones are a starting point, but could have more breadth.
  • Similarly, you have to know your business processes well to set up escalation and workflow; and setting them up can be a little time consuming.
  • It's also helpful to set up forms to help ensure tickets are going to the right team - and you have to understand basic programming logic to set them up; you also need a bit of design experience to make them user friendly. These don't always go hand in hand within one person; it would have been helpful to have more sample forms.
  • Some of the included color schemes are not ADA friendly, and they all should be.
If you have the knowledge about service catalogs, business processes, and have both programmers and designers available to help with this implementation, you should have an easy time setting this up. You'll also need a good understanding of all your functional groups and what each is responsible for to set up your groups and users.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Cherwell Service Management for enterprise IT Service Management. We are currently using Incident, Change, Problem and CMDB. We are in the process of implementing Purchasing and Asset Management.
  • Single platform that is easily managed.
  • Customer service and support is outstanding.
  • Continuous improvement of the product - new features (which are frequently customer driven) are added regularly at no additional cost.
  • Very easy to learn for users, administrators and developers.
  • Licensing model is simple and flexible - can implement perpetual and subscription in one instance. Migrate from SaaS to on premises or third party cloud with little effort and at low to no cost.
  • Database is not overly normalized. Very easy to understand and query.
  • Documentation is improving but is still incomplete.
  • "Codeless" architecture is great and easy to learn but it would be nice to have the a "power user" interface option to allow writing of things like expressions rather than click through drop downs.
  • Web UI is a bit slow and still not on par with the features of the client application.

Cherwell is a great choice for all organizations looking for an IT Service Management solution. It can scale to any size organization and training and support is great for those just getting started with ITIL-focused support.

For organizations seeking a platform that provides extensive capabilities beyond IT Service Management there may be better choices.

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