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SolarWinds Service Desk

SolarWinds Service Desk
Formerly Samanage

Overview

What is SolarWinds Service Desk?

SolarWinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage) is a cloud-based, multi-tenant IT service desk and asset management software for IT and enterprise service management. Samanage is on a single, always new instance of software. The service desk includes a self-service portal, service…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

SolarWinds Service Desk (formerly known as Samanage) is a versatile software solution that caters to a wide range of use cases across …
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SolarWinds is a homerun!

9 out of 10
May 30, 2022
We use SolarWinds Service Desk for our Incident tracking and it helps to use SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD) for the reporting that we must …
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Solarwinds works for us!

7 out of 10
December 15, 2020
Incentivized
It is used across the whole organization. It addresses Incident mgmt, change mgmt, purchase orders, and device management mainly for our …
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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

View all 13 features
  • Organize and prioritize service tickets (95)
    9.3
    93%
  • Self-service tools (85)
    8.0
    80%
  • Asset management dashboard (80)
    6.9
    69%
  • ITSM reports and dashboards (86)
    6.4
    64%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is SolarWinds Service Desk?

SolarWinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage) is a cloud-based, multi-tenant IT service desk and asset management software for IT and enterprise service management. Samanage is on a single, always new instance of software. The service desk includes a self-service portal, service catalog, knowledge…

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.solarwinds.com/products/pri…

Offerings

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

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Features

Incident and problem management

Streamlining ticketing and service restoration processes

8
Avg 8.2

ITSM asset management

Managing all IT assets and enforcing policy rules

6.9
Avg 8.2

Change management

Ensuring standardized processes for making changes to IT infrastructure

8
Avg 8.4
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Product Details

What is SolarWinds Service Desk?

SolarWinds Service Desk, previously Samanage Service Platform, is a cloud-based service desk for IT or any other department.

A single platform for service management, IT asset management and configuration management, Service Desk is ITIL-ready and complete with Incident, Problem, Change, and Release Management capabilities. Advanced reporting modules empower users to analyze trends, monitor service quality, and continuously improve service management processes.

SolarWinds Service Desk Features

Incident and problem management Features

  • Supported: Organize and prioritize service tickets
  • Supported: Expert directory
  • Supported: Service restoration
  • Supported: Self-service tools
  • Supported: Subscription-based notifications
  • Supported: ITSM collaboration and documentation
  • Supported: ITSM reports and dashboards

ITSM asset management Features

  • Supported: Configuration mangement
  • Supported: Asset management dashboard
  • Supported: Policy and contract enforcement

Change management Features

  • Supported: Change requests repository
  • Supported: Change calendar
  • Supported: Service-level management

Additional Features

  • Supported: Self-Service Portal
  • Supported: Software and Hardware Inventory Tracking
  • Supported: Robust and Flexible Reporting
  • Supported: Knowledge Base
  • Supported: Contract and License Tracking
  • Supported: Integration with Over 200 Applications
  • Supported: Code-Free Customization
  • Supported: SLA Management

SolarWinds Service Desk Screenshots

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SolarWinds Service Desk Video

SolarWinds Service Desk Overview

SolarWinds Service Desk Integrations

SolarWinds Service Desk Competitors

SolarWinds Service Desk Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesAll
Supported LanguagesSupport for 40+ Languages

Frequently Asked Questions

SolarWinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage) is a cloud-based, multi-tenant IT service desk and asset management software for IT and enterprise service management. Samanage is on a single, always new instance of software. The service desk includes a self-service portal, service catalog, knowledge base, and SLA management tool. The integrated agent-based asset management solution collects contracts and licensing data from Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix systems.

Zendesk Suite, ServiceNow IT Service Management, and Freshservice are common alternatives for SolarWinds Service Desk.

Reviewers rate Organize and prioritize service tickets highest, with a score of 9.3.

The most common users of SolarWinds Service Desk are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(161)

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!

SolarWinds Service Desk (formerly known as Samanage) is a versatile software solution that caters to a wide range of use cases across different industries and departments. Users have found the platform to be extremely valuable and user-friendly, enabling them to streamline processes and improve overall efficiency.

One of the primary uses of SolarWinds Service Desk is in IT incident management, where it provides service level agreements (SLAs) and measures customer satisfaction. It helps IT teams effectively manage and resolve tickets by centralizing ticket submission, documenting tasks, and providing real-time support. Additionally, it offers comprehensive automation capabilities for accurate tracking and management of requests.

The software is also commonly used for asset management, allowing organizations to track and manage their computer inventory and device assignment. This feature proves beneficial for various departments such as Customer Support, HR, Sales, and Facilities Management to efficiently handle inquiries, track warranties, contracts, licenses, and assets. Moreover, SolarWinds Service Desk enables users to create self-service forms and checklists for streamlined onboarding processes and makes job ticketing more efficient for media management teams.

Another notable use case of SolarWinds Service Desk is its utilization as a help desk platform company-wide. It allows employees to log tickets easily, browse knowledge base articles for IT assistance, and monitor their resolution. By cataloging and prioritizing IT requests, it assists in maintaining standardized processes while also providing transparency and records for incidents, changes, and inventories.

Overall, SolarWinds Service Desk has proven its versatility by being utilized for incident management, asset tracking, knowledge base portal access, vendor management, contract management, helpdesk operations, change management, service cataloging, and more across various industries and departments. It aids in improving efficiency and effectiveness in tackling everyday problems while minimizing interruptions and optimizing workloads.

Users commonly recommend Solar Winds for several reasons. Firstly, they suggest giving Solar Winds a try as it integrates into other applications and offers a good product at a lower cost. It is particularly recommended for small teams or teams without much IT expertise.

Secondly, users find Solar Winds to be an effective ticketing system that provides an organized and efficient way to communicate and address issues with clients. This makes it a great choice for companies in need of a reliable customer support solution.

Lastly, users suggest Solar Winds for its ability to fully manage a support shop, help IT teams streamline their tasks, and create custom catalogues and workflows. They also appreciate that it provides the necessary features to implement a small CMMS system without high implementation costs.

Overall, users believe that Solar Winds is an all-in-one customizable, hosted solution that offers integration capabilities, an efficient ticketing system, and the tools needed to manage IT tasks effectively.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-50 of 118)
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Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our IT Department uses it to manage IT assets deployed within our organization, as well as the SaaS applications we use in our daily operations. The network scanning utility saves us a lot of time by automatically pulling in data about the configuration and status of our assets. It's not the most customizable solution I've seen, but the defaults are adequate.
  • Mobile app works well
  • Effective help desk ticket management
  • Clean UI and logical layout of menus
  • Customization - Custom asset fields are difficult and not very effective.
  • Billing - It's a hassle to update billing info; billing dept. reps aren't as helpful as I'd like.
  • Integrations - There are very, very few. In today's environment, this is unacceptable.
Solarwinds Service Desk makes keeping tabs on a multitude of assets and users relatively painless. Out-of-the-box, it's quite functional and deployment can be completed in very little time. The platform is intuitive making user adoption easy. It's a bit of an island due to lack of integrations, so there's the trade-off. If you need a service desk that's highly customized and/or tightly integrated with other systems, you might look elsewhere -- but be prepared to pay more and invest more time getting that solution deployed.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are definitely not using SolarWinds to it's fullest capacity, and that is great. It offers the flexibility for us to pick and choose which features we want to implement (even within the Service Desk portion of the product) which has allowed us to scale easily. I have 4/10 departments utilizing the software successfully to act as a help desk for 450 employees.
  • Ability to streamline UI for various roles.
  • Extensive administrative settings and options.
  • AI to offer suggestions to techs and requesters.
  • Extremely transparent about any outages, causes, and steps to prevent again.
  • The system is very reliable: has only been inaccessible twice in the past 18 months of daily use.
  • Company will not accept reporting or other customization requests (consider it a new feature)
  • Reporting options are not intuitive & most cannot include details.
  • Little support from SolarWinds.
Although we do not use many aspects of the system, Service Desk processes 2,000 incidents (tickets) per month. Our support team can easily track, assign, and reply to tickets. Screenshots/attachments are easy to add. We gained a higher adoption by allowing end-users to email in requests instead of just using the portal, which is a great feature.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Piloted with only a specific department and then rolled out after 2 years to the whole organization. It addresses the problem of site agents and centralized agents who both can resolve issues users experience on technology platforms. It also addresses the need to aggregate solutions.
  • Issue management
  • Tagging of other people
  • Email notifications
  • Reports
  • Documenting changes
  • Documenting issues
  • Prompting Solutions
SolarWinds Service Desk is great for ticketing/issue management at dispersed or local organizations. The SLA breaches help for management of staff and increases timely resolution. It's not as helpful for time tracking or task tracking unless implemented/strictly used.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have three departments using Solarwinds Service Desk for Incident Management. Users send emails to the department that they need help from and Solarwinds creates the help desk ticket based on the email address sent to. We are also using Solarwinds to track our assets.
  • It is easily customizable.
  • Product support is outstanding.
  • The mobile app is super helpful.
  • It takes time to deploy the Asset management agent onto devices.
  • It would be nice if the page auto-refreshed.
Solarwinds Service Desk is well suited for any department that needs incident management. It is easy to use and the GUI is easy to navigate.
Kevin Staton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Solarwinds Service Desk across the organization for:
  • Office experience and building maintenance incidents
  • IT incidents
  • Forms-based approvals
  • Business process improvement
  • Vendor and contract management
As a mid-sized company, many of our processes were previously informal. Solarwinds Service Desk helped us create process workflows for many requests that were previously difficult to track and measure. The reporting tools give a much more holistic view of these requests for decision-makers and give users more transparency into the process.

Additionally, the vendor and contract management modules help us track contract expiration on everything from SaaS licensing to hardware and consulting contracts. We also use vendor and contract management to gather and store security-related documentation such as PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and Privacy Policies. We store these with the vendor so that we have a central repository of all security compliance documentation.
  • Incident Management
  • Process Workflow
  • Vendor and Contract Management
  • A welcoming landing page
  • There is potential to greatly improve the capacity for cascading attributes. Currently, categories are limited to a top-level category and one subcategory. This leaves a fairly shallow decision tree.
  • Greater flexibility to modify the layout of incident request forms.
  • More integration options for cloud file-sharing platforms. Solarwinds Service Desk has tie-ins to Dropbox but not other vendors.
Solarwinds Service Desk strikes a good balance between cost and features. If you're an organization without any tools for incident management, process workflows, or vendor management, then Solarwinds Service Desk will be a huge improvement. Service Desk has more features than other products in the same tier. We compared Solarwinds Service Desk to Zendesk but found that Zendesk was missing key capabilities.

For larger organizations or organizations with more sophisticated project management, dashboard, incident management, asset tracking needs... as well as larger budgets... something like ServiceNow or TeamDynamix would be a better choice.

The key takeaway for Solarwinds Service Desk is that it has many features at a fraction of the cost of the big players in this space. It won't be as customizable as the more expensive models but it will help you mature your ITSM and help with organization wide process improvement.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for help desk and inventorying IT assets. The IT department controls all aspects of Solarwinds Service Desk and maintain the inventory. Users input tickets and monitors their progress for help desk related issues, and the IT department uses tickets to track work for documentation and to keep users in the loop on their IT related issues.
  • Help desk
  • Inventory IT assets
  • Licensing tracking
  • Licensing tracking
Great if looking to have a ticketing system end-users and the IT department can use to track, discuss, and review any tech-related issues. Makes getting the info the IT department needs from the end-user to work on the issue simply and streamlined.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Solarwinds Service Desk for two main purposes:
  • Access Request Forms: for when a new or existing user is requesting access to our various IT systems.
  • Helpdesk Tickets: For when end users are in need of IT support.
The product is administered by our IT Dept but is used by all personnel throughout the organization. Using Solarwinds Service Desk allows us to address the problem of being able to meet our compliance and audit requirements. While there are many "service desk" products on the market, Solarwinds Service Desk was the only one we've found that allows for a hierarchy of approvals to be documented in each ticket or request.
  • Approval flows: You can have multiple layers of approval required for the tickets and service requests you design. This helps us show auditors that access to privileged systems and data was formerly reviewed and approved by the appropriate managers.
  • Easy to design forms: You don't need to spend hours reading the documentation to figure out how to create forms. It's simple enough that you can just jump right in and start creating them with minimal training.
  • Lots of options and features are available for you to include in your forms.
  • Integrates well with SAML-based SSO and has capabilities for MFA.
  • Easy and useful search function. Need to find that ticket from last year that you worked for a particular user or issue? Just search by keyword or username, and it'll quickly find the ticket.
  • The layout of the forms doesn't make good use of all the space on the page. Specifically, all the text is constrained to a small area on the side of the page, while 80% of the page is just blank space. It forces you to type everything into a small box.
  • You can't delete old users, you can only disable them. The disabled users don't count towards your license, but if you work for a company with lots of turnover, it's really annoying when most of the people on the "users" screen don't even work there anymore. Thankfully you can filter out the inactive users, but still, why can't I just delete them?
Solarwinds Service Desk is well suited for scenarios where you need one or more of the following:
  • Complex form features that go beyond forms where you simply type text into a box.
  • The ability to create complex menus in your forms, using multiple variables.
  • An audit trail showing who did what with a request or ticket.
  • An approvals flow, showing that requests are formally approved by the designated approvers.
Solarwinds Service Desk is probably not well suited for scenarios where you just need a simple ticket system that doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds Service Desk as our incident management tool as well as our asset management tool. We have a small IT team so a cloud solution for service desk tickets fits us perfectly. We purchased it when it was still independent (Samanage). The asset management is great, does not have intrusive aspects on the computers we installed it on, and we have an accurate picture of what we have deployed. The portal view of tickets has also been great at increasing transparency into our activities, plus I am using it for my IT management reporting.
  • Service Desk tool - ability to create / update/ resolve tickets. Flow (ticket life cycle) can be customized, and notifications as well.
  • Asset Management - automatically gathers information from computers using an agent installed on the computers.
  • Reporting - ability to slice and dice tickets to get insight into most common problems.
  • Being a web platform, some of the refresh is problematic. Not sure this can be solved in the tool, it's important to have a clear understanding who owns the ticket.
  • Some time the performance / update speed is slow, but I have to give them credit, this has never resulted in an outage and in general it is solved within a couple of hours.
Works great for smaller IT teams, with fairly vanilla ticket workflows. Great for web access, there is even a mobile app available. Solarwinds Service Desk does not require a large amount of administration, and it's fairly intuitive. Brings great visibility into what is installed, as long as the agent is deployed correctly.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Currently it is only used by our IT Department as our Help Desk ticketing system and Asset Management solution. We are in the process of working on using custom forms to simplify hardware and new user account requests through the employee self service portal.
  • Integration and setup was quick and easy
  • Great single pane of glass view for asset management
  • The time it takes for an asset to show up in the portal after agent installation
  • Ability to block an asset that has been manually removed from the portal but still has the agent installed
  • Search file under active computers for computer name or username
  • Separate columns for Computer and IP
  • Ability to select preferred columns when exporting
  • Ability to automatically link computer name and asset tag #
So far it has been a great "out of the box" solution. I haven't really found any area that it hasn't been suited for in our environment.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Solarwinds Service Desk as our main IT Service Management and ticketing system. It is very easy to use and our main tool across the whole organization. With this tool, our users are always getting on-time IT support as there is no chance to miss or forget an IT support request once the ticket is logged in the system.
  • Helpdesk ticketing system
  • IT Inventory Management
  • Create QR codes for all assets and use the QR code for easy assets tracking
  • Audit and check what is installed on our computers
  • None
Solarwinds Service Desk is a great tool for managing the day-to-day IT service desk team, plus it's best to track and control the IT assets. You can also embed surveys to get feedback from the users on how the IT team is helping and providing IT Support. This is very important to find out if there is any issue or delay from your team.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Solarwinds Service Desk is being used by not only the IT dept but our Accounting and HR departments as well. Mainly we in IT use it to track "incidents" that occur with the technology on the floor or with our remote workers. Over time other departments have been setting up tickets such as investigations which are exactly as they sound. Accounting utilizes our Solarwinds Service Desk to help keep track of all the software contracts that are expiring, and for us to remember to get them the monthly invoices for contracts that are related to the IT Dept. We utilize Solarwinds Service Desk to track company assets so by putting in the make, model, and the serial number of every machine that we set up and assign it to a user so when that user submits a ticket we can attach it to their computer. Some business problems it has helped address is being able to show proof to our auditor of our monthly reminders such as checking the generator, reviewing training policies and see if the trainings that went out were actually completed on time.
  • Incident/Helpdesk Ticketing
  • Platform Customization
  • Asset Management
  • Contract Reminders
  • User and Admin Friendly Interface
  • Mobile App flow could be better in regards to incident management
  • Certain customization options aren't very easy to find
  • Difficulty figuring out how to remove legacy categories from incident forms
Solarwinds Service Desk is well suited for helping with tracking incidents, contract renewals, asset management. The reporting is phenomenal once you have fine-tuned it for your needs. Running a vanilla report that's unconfigured will be difficult to understand.

It's less appropriate for tracking investigations. This is often best left in email with HR. The knowledge base is good, but could use some improvements particularly when typing out the knowledge base articles as they are defined.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use the Solarwinds Service Desk in the capacity of incident management, change management, issue tracking, asset management, and technical information repository. Other departments within our organization use it as well for non-technical issue tracking and workflow/process management. The main business problem it addresses for us is in the efficient tracking and management of trouble tickets within the organization.

  • The platform is pretty easy to use by non-technical staff.
  • Setting up and managing things like single sign-on and automatic user-provisioning is straightforward when coupled with Azure AD.
  • Customizing categories and workflows was fairly simple.
  • Asset management could be better.
  • Using the platform to track orders could be better as custom PO numbers cannot be entered in a searchable way.
  • Integrations with other service desk applications still could be improved, but has gotten a lot better with the Solarwinds acquisition of Samanage.
Solarwinds Service Desk works pretty well for an organization of our size. We moved from an internally-hosted solution to this and found it much easier to manage and much more feature-rich than many other entry-level solutions. In the less appropriate sphere, I could see this being a platform some organizations could outgrow as reporting needs and user counts expand.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We started off using Solarwinds Service Desk in our IT department as a replacement for TrackIt to keep our knowledge base and track incident response. Soon after implementation, we brought in our Facilities Services, Document Services, and Office Services groups, built out service catalog items for those groups, and opened our self-service portal to the entire firm. Having these different service areas linked in the Solarwinds Service Desk has broken down silos between departments. We look forward to bringing in other departments such as Accounting, HR, and Marketing in the future.
  • Communication - public and private comments on incidents keep technicians and requesters in touch throughout the life cycle of an incident.
  • Accessibility - there are multiple ways to engage through the service ranging from entering tickets, chat, and having email directed to auto-create incidents.
  • Self-service - users can request help or services, report problems, and look up information from the knowledge base without assistance, which lends to a more informed and self-sufficient workforce.
  • Service - it's easy to communicate questions or problems to Solarwinds Service Desk support and they are generally very capable, responsive, and willing to escalate feature requests.
  • Service Catalog - it's impressive how much you can accomplish when building out a catalog item; however, there is room for improvement as you cannot go too deep into conditional logic. For instance: building out a request for travel where a user might want to select one or all of hotel, air, and car can only really be effective for one of those items. You'd have to create three separate catalog items, which makes no sense. I believe they'll remedy this shortcoming eventually, though.
  • Change Management - the communication within change management isn't as polished as it is in the incidents module. Notifications do not fire when expected. There has been a recent update to change management, so this may have improved.
  • Reminders - when a task is created and a due date applied, an email with a calendar reminder is sent. The .ics reminder is clunky (not editable) and has to be actively added to one's 3rd-party calendar program. Reminders and notifications WITHIN Solarwinds Service Desk could be far more robust for agents and task-users.
I think Solarwinds Service Desk is well suited to an IT environment where tracking incidents and communicating with requesters is a high priority. Organizations that want to bring service into focus between historically siloed departments would be well advised to consider Solarwinds Service Desk. I think this platform would be less productive for smaller organizations, as the cost would be prohibitive and may not see a sufficient return on investment.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Solarwinds Service Desk as our Helpdesk support tool to manage and address all IT issues for our entire organization. Additionally, it is utilized by our Facilities department to manage all facilities issues and requests. Solarwinds Service Desk gives us a single platform to understand what issues our end users are having and be able to report on them to our senior management. We also take advantage of the inventory functions of Solarwinds Service Desk to track warranty status as well as being the reporting for budgeting as our laptop and desktops are aging.
  • Good inventory reporting
  • Easy to use
  • Budget friendly
  • Metric reporting needs improvements
Solarwinds Service Desk is a low-cost tool that allows a company to get all of the functions of help desk tracking and ticketing without a major investment. Solarwinds Service Desk is easy to use and very easy to set up. If you are looking for a fast and inexpensive ticketing system this is the one for you.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Solarwinds Service Desk is used within our IT department to catalog and prioritize requests. It allows a standardized process for users to request IT support and allows IT and management to view current and historical requests.
  • Ticket Management
  • Automated notifications
  • Setup
  • Reporting / Data Exports (Currently manual request to generate *.csv)
  • Limited configuration and customization options in base product
  • User management
Any team providing core support for a larger organization would benefit from a tool like Solarwinds Service Desk. We use this in IT, but it could be useful for groups such as HR to manage employee questions and requests, or a centralized marketing department, requisitions team, etc.

The tool seems optimized for use within an organization. I don't see how it would support external customers in a clean fashion.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Solarwinds Service Desk across our whole corporation, this includes approximately 750 users. Solarwinds Service Desk is the first stop for any issues or requests our users have. We log every issue or request fr tracking and auditing purposes. It is used to follow an employee and thier equipment from the hiring process through the termination process. We also use it to track all of our software and hardware assets.
  • Solarwinds Service Desk is so customizable. Pretty much anything you can think of you can do with it. The interface and what you can do with it is very powerful.
  • Solarwinds Service Desk has lots of integrations with other systems and they are constantly adding more.
  • Solarwinds Service Desk has very strong reporting capabilities. Because of everything it indexes, you can report against literally anything.
  • Solarwinds Service Desk can have a steep learning curve. We came from an older help desk system that was not as feature-rich so we struggled to understand all of the features at first.
  • Even though Solarwinds Service Desk is very flexible there are still areas that we wish we had more control over. Things like renaming fields or rearranging certain layouts can be challenging.
  • Implementing Solarwinds Service Desk can be a daunting task. The hours they provide for help with the initial configuration is definitely not enough, you'll need more.
Solarwinds Service Desk is miles above our old service desk system. The searching capabilities make it easy to find what you are looking for and the more you use it and the more data you feed it, the better it gets. It definitely is a learning system and the more you and your users work with it the more you'll get out of it. If your users are not tech-savvy, they may need some additional training on the system. But my advice is to keep the forms and workflows simple, at least what is end user-facing. You can always allow the technicians to add additional information in the background.
Matthaniel Cowell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently only use Solarwinds Service Desk in the IT department and in collaboration with select IT related vendors. This platform allows us to maintain great records of all incidents, actions, changes, and inventories of our IT-related cases and products in one place. Service Desk helps us maintain great quality of service with our internal customers with alerts and reliable tracking of incidents and inventory.
  • Great API Interface
  • Now Very Customizable
  • Integrates well with G Suite
  • Reasonable Licensing Terms
  • GUI can be sometimes wonky, especially with newly added features.
  • Mass CSV Import feature through GUI can be cryptic and cumbersome. (Better to use the API if you can.)
  • Exclusively relies on custom email extensions to automatically create incidents from received emails (ex: support+whatever@domain.com) instead of reading a properties template for an email forwarded to special support email like Zendesk.
  • The "Remote Support" feature that integrates with LogMeIn and GoToAssist has never worked and SolarWinds support doesn't seem to know how to get this to work as explained in documentation.
This platform is great for managing and tracking incidents, changes, inventory, and creating Support/FAQ articles for the organization. It might not be great for managing network diagrams or some other high-image-based documentation, though it will work. The feature set seems to be always expanding, so some stuff that may be lacking might be soon available.
Barb Crepeau | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently using Solarwinds Service Desk as an inventory, purchasing, license tracking tool, but have also previously used the ticket system portion as well. We started using it as our IT department only and it spread throughout our nursing organization.
  • Asset Management
  • Software Management
  • User Interface
  • Very Limited Customization
  • No test environment
Solarwinds Service Desk has great functionality from the start, user friendly for IT departments. But as we expanded our service offerings with our management system to include finance and human resources etc., it wasn’t the best product for us. We still use the asset/software tracker and love it.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Help desk ticket submission company-wide. Inventory tracking. Customer satisfaction feedback.
  • Easy for users to submit trouble tickets.
  • Two-way communications during trouble resolution.
  • It really is a complete package.
It is mainly a help desk ticket submission and tracking system for us. The agent also provides hardware and software inventory.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Solarwinds ServiceDesk for our technical support agents, including network operations and developers. We also use it to manage our onboarding and purchasing requests. It is generally used by the IT department and HR staff for new hires, technical support and purchasing. We have implemented the self service portal, which is showing some corporate adoption. This tool has helped to address ticket management and tracking for all types of requests that come to our team.
  • Asset management is done well with this tool. We can track ownership of equipment and help track warranty for replacements.
  • Ticket tracking with time spent on requests is also done quite well—we use this a lot to report back to the executive as to how the business is doing.
  • Building the service catalog is quite easy as well. You can really do a lot with automation and conditions to make sure certain types of requests get to the right teams to be completed.
  • Adding the ability to update incidents from the problem tickets is a great new feature just enabled this past week! Love this one.
  • Reporting could be a lot better. Currently, only being able to see PDF files with charts that don't include time spent on calls in any meaningful way. I end up exporting tickets and creating my own reports.
  • Tagging for automation needs improvement. Smart suggestions don't offer any value. I haven't seen any smart suggestions pop up for known solution articles, so that's somewhat lackluster.
  • The synchronization between Azure and Samanage has never worked properly. We have worked with tech support and still had to manually update user information.
Solarwinds is very easy to set up from the start. We have added groups and technicians to those groups for easy ticket assignments, and asset management tracking is very useful. It's a young tool with a lot of room to grow in terms of automation, but I really like it.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization has used Samanage since 2015 and have not looked back since. We transitioned from a BMC platform offering. At first, we rolled out the software to support both information technology and administration requests. Over time, we have expanded the offering to Human Resources as well. It allows our employees to have a one-stop-shop for support requests.
  • Service catalog
  • Workflow and approvals
  • Single sign-on
  • API
  • Email Addresses are used as a unique identifier. As a result, an email address can only belong to one single Samanage environment. If supporting external users, you may run into overlaps.
  • Workflows have room for improvement as it relates to dynamic input and conditional logic.
From an asset management standpoint, it is well suited for IT-related equipment. We use it to track all physical nodes across the infrastructure. However, it is not built to support non-IT assets very well (e.g. keys, badges, etc.). The offering is very IT-centric for what is marketed as a solution to be used "beyond IT."
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We implemented SWSD as our IT services ticketing solution to replace our former ticketing software with a more modern solution. Since implementing it 1 year ago, it has taken off and is now starting to be used by other business units outside of IT for managing workflows, intake of new work, and tracking metrics of work.
  • Self service
  • Automation
  • Reporting
  • Asset management
  • CMDB
  • Alerting
  • BI integration
Great out of the box cloud-based solution that is easy to implement and easy to maintain and administer. Well suited for any company that is looking for a solution that does not require a full-time administrator to maintain the platform but offers easy to configure workflows and integrations. Maybe less suited for enterprise-level organizations.
Derek G Desautels Jr | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As a construction company, we have utilized Solarwinds Service Desk in a very unique way. We launched Solarwinds for our homeowners and warranty team. This gives the homeowners the ability to log in/email warranty-related items on their homes so that the warranty team can address them and track the tickets as they come in.
  • Ability to manage and close out tickets
  • Inventory asset tracking
  • Service catalog items - Great for on-boarding new employees
  • Reporting
  • Reporting
  • Reporting
Solarwinds Service Desk is perfectly suited for any company's internal IT functions. Great for IT when onboarding new employees, tracking assets, or managing tickets. The ability to make service catalog items for onboarding is easy, well built, and fully customizable.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Solarwinds Service Desk for inventory and ticketing service.
  • Inventory tracking
  • Forwarding ticketing requests
  • Price point for smaller businesses that don't use all aspects of it
Solarwinds Service Desk is well suited for people working remotely or on site to have a nice clean looking ticketing service tool that is easy to use so anyone can log in and use with minimal training.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Solarwinds Service Desk for our IT Helpdesk. Our end-users create work orders that are then assigned out through our staff and tracked to completion. We also use it to track problem areas within our company to find where we can improve our technology performance.
  • Clear Incident viewing
  • Ease of use
  • Easy structure to follow
  • Work order details should be primary over comments.
We have really enjoyed having Solarwinds implemented as our IT Help Desk software and can see it easily being used to track all of our maintenance work orders as well. I can see where it might have some limitations in some settings, but for us, it is well suited.
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