Cherwell - a true enterprise service management solution!
Updated October 18, 2022

Cherwell - a true enterprise service management solution!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cherwell Service Management

We use Cherwell Service Management as an enterprise service management solution - where our IT department is actually NOT the largest consumer of the tool! We have branched out from the typical ITSM processes in Cherwell to use it for managing new store openings, DC safety incidents, and numerous finance-related workflows unique to our organization. We are able to consolidate more and more of our organizational functions within a single pane of glass, which is precisely the reason (and one of the many benefits) of purchasing Cherwell.
  • Workflow Management
  • Automation
  • Integrations
  • No-code/low-code content development
  • Flexibility to use on multiple operating systems
  • Updated web UI/UX
  • Standardized form creation
  • Improved machine learning
  • Built-in AI chat bot
  • Saved thousands of dollars on third-party products by developing the same solution in Cherwell.
  • The ability to have cross-functional departments using the same tool increases efficiency considerably.
  • Knowledge Management has assisted to drive customers to self-help, allowing support teams to focus on more important objectives.
Both Remedy & CA were far more complex to implement, enhance and support. The architecture and framework each solution was developed on didn't lend itself to be no-code or low-code like Cherwell, and therefore the ability to expand and utilize either tool on an enterprise-level was severely restricted. The cost-benefit of those options vs Cherwell was also a primary reason to steer clear.

Do you think Cherwell Service Management delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cherwell Service Management's feature set?

Yes

Did Cherwell Service Management live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Cherwell Service Management go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cherwell Service Management again?

Yes

Cherwell is a well-rounded product that can really be utilized as far as one's imagination can stretch. I've used the product in both a corporate and medical environment, where the tool was used for vastly different reasons (i.e., ITSM, business & retail functions, vs hospital orderlies & medical equipment tracking in a CMDB, etc.). Cherwell is so versatile that you can really use it to develop any workflow or process that is unique to your line of business - there are more than enough functions and tools available within Cherwell to effectively manage any enterprise solution your organization needs. The major drawback of flexibility is supportability. Given that you can essentially develop anything you want (content-wise) in Cherwell, it can quickly become highly complex and difficult to support by anyone other than the original developer. Documentation is key (F-spec & T-spec especially!) when developing larger solutions in Cherwell.

Cherwell Service Management Feature Ratings

Organize and prioritize service tickets
10
Expert directory
10
Service restoration
6
Self-service tools
6
Subscription-based notifications
7
ITSM collaboration and documentation
9
ITSM reports and dashboards
9
Configuration mangement
9
Asset management dashboard
9
Policy and contract enforcement
7
Change requests repository
10
Change calendar
6
Service-level management
7

Using Cherwell Service Management

10000 - Several departments in the organization are using Cherwell, from distribution centers, retail, HR, IT, InfoSec, Finance, Transport, and Legal. There is more usage by departments outside of IT, making Cherwell a true ESM tool in our organization.
4 - Our team comprises of a manager (who also helps with some development), two BAs (one principal one senior), and a developer. We cross-train as much as possible but each have our primary responsibilities.
  • ITSM
  • Distribution Center Safety Management
  • HR
  • Retail New Store
  • DC Safety Management process to report incidents & send data to OSHA
  • New retail store opening process that uses user-managed templates to generate hundreds of tasks at various stages of the workflow
  • Europe transport claims for issuing credits/invoices to suppliers
  • Integrating with HR solutions (i.e. Workday, Kronos, etc.)
  • MS Teams integration (inc. cards)
  • Future DC safety enhancements (inspections)
Cherwell is still the best tool for the job in the market. Even though Ivanti bought them and are trying to convince everyone to move over to Neurons for ITSM, they have stated Cherwell will remain supported indefinitely and have a roadmap for future Cherwell development. Unfortunately, ISM is not as flexible as Cherwell (and the UX is atrocious), hence why many people are sticking with Cherwell (and why many Cherwell customers never purchased ISM originally).

Evaluating Cherwell Service Management and Competitors

Yes - We had an extremely old version of Remedy which had to be supported by external vendors due to the complex nature of the tool. It lacked a lot of core (common) functionality on the market today and the expense of keeping (or upgrading) didn't match the benefit of keeping it.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
Cherwell has the richest feature-set in the market today, and is incredibly flexible to develop within. There are no other tools that offer no-code/low-code as effectively. The cost of the licensing is reasonable (and concurrent) which made it an easy sell financially.
I don't believe our evaluation/selection would change. We had a robust RFP to determine the best tool on the market for our organization.

Cherwell Service Management Implementation

Implementation is a breeze. Each time I've implemented it, we had an outsourced vendor overseeing it & assisting where needed. However, Cherwell OOTB is ready to go, and configuring it for LDAP/SAML, etc. for authentication and user-imports is really straight forward. The infrastructure needed for Cherwell is extremely simple too - and installing the server & database takes no more than 20 mins.
  • Third-party professional services
We are hosted as a SaaS client by Ivanti (formerly Cherwell, who stood up our environment for us).
Yes - We spent over a year designing and developing the product in-house. That included rebuilding Incident/Request, Change, the self-service portal and some customized objects for announcements. The service catalog was built from scratch, and now spans over 800+ services on offer - which we were able to build based on several meetings with every single stakeholder who would house their service offerings in Cherwell. We have 400+ forms on our portal site as a result of those meetings & requirements gathering.
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled - Change management had their own requirements for their process that was custmozied by Cherwell as a part of our project (since our in-house developer was focused on other features). The down-side is that Cherwell just did as they were told, without sanity checking the requirements provided, and unfortunately there was some overly-complex solutions in place for Change that were ultimately not necessary.
  • Stakeholders being change-averse, due to their lack of understanding of Cherwell & pushing out the timeline

Cherwell Service Management Training

  • In-Person Training
We had a 'train-the-trainer' session from Cherwell to some of our users who were unfamiliar with the product, and we had an individual who 'championed' training internally and provided several training classes over the period of a few weeks for new Cherwell users. We also had a team who traveled to remote sites to conduct in-person training there too.

Configuring Cherwell Service Management

Highly configurable, anything you can imagine you can build!
Start simple and work from there. You will come across some wild requirements when developing content in Cherwell, and I usually try to talk people off the edge and start with something more streamlined and build upon it as they determine what their needs actually are. As I have said, you can build really complex solutions in Cherwell (and sometimes you have to), but documenting that and supporting it has to be taken into consideration too.
Yes - we have customized the interface extensively - I have had several years experience with Cherwell, so developing entirely customized solutions from nothing has been both fun and relatively easy to do. Depending on the organization's usage of Cherwell, you will often step outside the boundaries of ITSM and move more into the ESM space - which is what we've done. We have really taken the core capabilities of Cherwell content and used it across several departments in our organization.
No - we have not done any custom code
We have also integrated with numerous systems in our organization - something else that is fairly straight forward to do using REST API calls via One-Steps!

Cherwell Service Management Support

Support is generally very lackluster unfortunately. Both before & after Cherwell was acquired by Ivanti, support has remained fairly consistently poor. As a hosted customer, you have to rely on support for day-to-day requests such as access to view logs, restarting services (although this is automated, it can fail a lot); and the room for error when relying on support for these tasks is high. Not to mention the turnaround time for tickets to be addressed (I've had some tickets open for over a year before a DR was created). Suffice to say that the product sells itself, the support nor the organization who own Cherwell benefit consumers much at all.
ProsCons
Immediate help available
Slow Resolution
Poor followup
Less knowledgeable
Problems left unsolved
Not kept informed
Escalation required
Need to explain problems multiple times
Support doesn't seem to care
Slow Initial Response
Yes, we had to. Ordinary support was that bad. Premium support has so far not really lived up to the expectations (or cost), but response times are generally more prompt. However, we still have the same issues with resolution times, the skills of the support staff, etc.
Yes - Some bugs were resolved in future releases, there are some I logged 3 years ago which still have not been addressed. Development for bug fixes in Cherwell is not quick, and fixes depend on you upgrading the entire platform which is not desirable either.

Using Cherwell Service Management

I love how easy it is to design and develop solutions in Cherwell. There is yet to be anything I've come across that I can't do in the tool - the question usually becomes, 'we can do it, but should we?'. Most of the features in Cherwell are intuitive, and the development can be as simple or compelx as you wish.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
None
  • API integrations
  • Workflows
  • Form design
  • Automation
  • Dashboards
  • Reports

Cherwell Service Management Reliability

We have never had any major show-stopper issues with Cherwell itself - more so with the infrastructure it sits on. Moving from in-house cloud (on Cherwell's side), to AWS then to Azure has caused multiple problems over the years (some still on-going), however the product has remained fairly stable.
Almost always available, with exception for a handful of outages due to infrastructure related issues.
The browser client is mostly acceptable in terms of performance, but still lacks parity with the rich client. The rich client is not very performant at all. It's built on old architecture and relies heavily on a fast internet connection, good caching and database indexing. There are several unwritten rules with form design (and form arrangement) which most users are not aware of, but can severely impact performance in the rich client. This is where the flexibility of Cherwell can come back to bite you if you step outside the boundaries of these unwritten rules...

Integrating Cherwell Service Management

We've integrated with several systems, and using REST API calls in One-Steps is really straight forward and easy to do.
  • Pagerduty
  • Jira
  • MS Graph
  • Loopback to Cherwell
  • In-house enterprise service APIs
  • MS Teams
  • File import/export
  • Single Signon
  • API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
If it makes sense to integrate with another system to streamline workflows and processes, then don't be afraid to do it. It's easily controlled and maintained and secure!

Relationship with Ivanti

I was not involved in this process.
Mostly it was fine. The project management on their end was not great, but the solutions engineers we worked with have always been fantastic.
As mentioned, they were always great to work with (minus the project management side). My only feedback would be to push back on requirements that don't make sense.
We have had great contracts with Cherwell and love the concurrent licensing model.
Stand your ground, and escalate when you need to (which you will probably need to).

Upgrading Cherwell Service Management

Yes - We always do extensive testing prior to any upgrades; and sometimes there are things we miss. However, after each upgrade, even if we did miss something, there's almost always a workaround we can put in place to address it. The major issues we've had with upgrades is the vendor (support); they often do something wrong, or forget to configure something the way it previously was, and they take a LONG time to upgrade (in excess of 2 hours sometimes). The process on-prem would take 20 mins max. - but being a SaaS customer you don't have the luxury of an experienced engineer upgrading your environment, nor are they solely focusing on your upgrade at that point in time (they're still answering calls and working other tickets).
  • Increased browser performance & parity
  • Improved UI for forms