Solarwinds - When you need a complete Service Desk
April 28, 2020
Solarwinds - When you need a complete Service Desk
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Solarwinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage)
We manage IT services for a number of companies and this is our helpdesk incident management software. We utilize the purchasing function for ourselves as well as the contracts management module for several of the companies. Currently, only the IT department is using this software. The inventory module is also used across most companies and provides an excellent foundation for ITIL service management.
- Helpdesk Incident ticketing - Solarwinds does an excellent job of incident tracking and enables you to fold those incidents into Problems and then use effective change management when called for. It provides a full ITIL management package.
- Inventory Tracking and Management - It has a really nice, complete package for Hardware and Software management. The agent is pretty light and data is encrypted.
- Change Management and Approval Workflows - There's a really nice module here. Allows you to attach an Incident ticket or multiple incidents as a Problem. Lets you manage changes to systems, services, etc. and get approvals from the appropriate stakeholders while providing an audit trail for everything.
- Reporting - Custom reporting leaves a little bit to be desired. They need to find a happy medium between having to make your own variables and query and not having the ability to customize a report. It would also be nice to have the ability to export reports to Excel.
- Time Tracking on Incident Tickets - Time tracking is pretty much a manual thing. The agents just estimate the time they spend on a ticket and enter it manually into a time tracking field. There is no automated tracking of time and it's not a mandatory field.
- Project Management - It would be great to have a project management capability built in that we could use to set up tickets, changes, tasks, etc for longer term projects.
- It provides much better inventory management for our network.
- The service desk with approval workflows for tasks.
- Change management for network or policy changes.
Solarwinds Service Desk is a far superior product to my experience with Connectwise. Connectwise, at the time, did not have ITIL inventory management or very good time management built in. You had to purchase add-ons. Furthermore, it was very buggy and crashed repeatedly. Service level was nowhere near as good as Solarwinds.
Zendesk was very stable but, again, did not manage hardware inventory or do a very good job of change management. Also, reporting was very much an Ad-Hoc service as you had to write your own query. I even had to develop my own measure for time spent on a ticket so I could report time back to my companies. I felt this was a serious flaw in the system.
Do you think SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD) delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)'s feature set?
Yes
Did SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD) live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD) go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD) again?
Yes