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Great ITSM and ITAM Tool!
Updated March 16, 2022

Great ITSM and ITAM Tool!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)

We currently use Solarwinds Service Desk as our main ITSM and ITAM tool. Its used throughout the company and specific groups have more accessibility for views on specific incidents or trends for better visibility. It allows us to manage tickets for incidents and also service requests. We can also manage our assets as well.
  • Ease of use.
  • Filtering of incidents.
  • Modern UI.
  • ITIL standardization for tickets. (Incident vs Request)
  • Granular settings.
  • More customization on Automations.
  • Up-time over the last year has been inconsistent.
  • Ease of use has been a great help with on-boarding of Analysts.
  • Overall great but could use some improvements.
Solarwinds has a much better UI than Remedy. It's more modern and flows better than the older "Windows 95" view of Remedy. Spiceworks does offer a modern UI but is lacking on a lot of features that are considered basic for ITSM related tools. Spiceworks does work very well for smaller companies that need but the core functions of ITSM.
They do respond back and assist very quickly with common questions. If there is an outage or a big issue that occurs with SWSD, they can sometimes take longer to respond or reply with a resolution regarding the issue. Most of the time they'll reply back with a notice stating that they have notified their engineering team.

Do you think SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD) delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)'s feature set?

No

Did SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD) live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD) go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD) again?

No

For smaller companies or environments, it greatly excels. It has basic to intermediate functionality that addresses basic functions for managing tickets and assets. It could use some more granular settings in different portions for a larger enterprise environment. It meets the demands but could use more bells and whistles. The recent improvements are better.

SolarWinds Service Desk Feature Ratings

Incident and problem management
6.3
Organize and prioritize service tickets
7
Expert directory
5
Service restoration
7
Self-service tools
7
Subscription-based notifications
7
ITSM collaboration and documentation
6
ITSM reports and dashboards
5
ITSM asset management
7.0
Configuration mangement
7
Asset management dashboard
7
Policy and contract enforcement
7
Change management
8.0
Change requests repository
8
Change calendar
7
Service-level management
9

ROI

Yes - Previously, we were using HelpStar as an ITSM application. The usability of HelpStar was fine but was extremely slow and cumbersome. It also didn't have much integrations with assets or applications. So SWSD was able to integrate a good amount of things we needed for ease of access and use.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
So I'm pretty sure price was a huge factor in the deciding vote for SWSD. I didn't have an initial say in the purchase but compared to most ITSMs it was much cheaper. It also started off as Samanage and was a smaller entity before being purchased by SolarWinds recently.

Using SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)

200 - Nearly all the users are within our Technology & Innovation group at our company. They utilize it for incident reporting or resolutions. We also use it for IT specific functions such as incident creation, asset management, and employee change management. The core functionality that we use it for is case/incident management.
5 - The administrators must have a good understanding of certain aspects. One of them being ITSM and ITIL knowledge because you'll need to know what SLAs and category management will be implemented. There is some basic coding like regex can be utilized to create automations or key functions to have some tasks either automated, ran with keywords, or macros.
  • Incident Managment
  • Asset Managment
  • Change Management
  • Round robin assignments
  • Ticket assignments via keywords
  • Automatic ticket closing
  • Mobile management
  • Autopilot setup
  • Instant alerts
Over the years SWSD has improved dramatically. I remember when it was Samanage and they had a very basic functionality where as other ITSM applications has tons of features and integrations. But SWSD has been keeping up in terms of integrations and functions so they are improving every year. It still has issues but it's a solid platform for the cost.