Item: SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Rating: 8
Author: Virginia Grey

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SolarWinds is being used for Incidents, Contract Management and Inventory by the IT Department. Until we had Samanage, IT had no way to track service requests or document outcomes. Now we have established benchmarks and can provide metrics to our Executive Team to document growth and technical trends.

Pros and Cons

Incidents - the bread and butter of an IT department. SolarWinds has an easy-to-use configuration. Training takes minutes.
Inventory is excellent. If technical equipment is purchased, it gets tracked in SolarWinds and we can easily track items, even if they've been assigned to other staff.

Changes in Incidents should be fully disclosed before dev releases them. Many times we started on a Monday and found things were turned around and it took us awhile to find what we needed and get used to the new setup.
Reporting really needs to be more robust. We can pull some canned reports that can be used in meetings, but for IT staff who need to get specific information quickly, that doesn't happen.

Return on Investment

All positive: the service desk helped us organize, categorize and track our incidents.

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk

Samanage offered the same options, for a much better cost. SolarWinds might be up there with Zendesk now.

Support Rating

Usually very responsive, when there is an issue.

Key Insights

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

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

Other Software Used

LogMeIn Central, Bitdefender GravityZone, Acronis Cyber Backup Cloud

Likelihood to Recommend

For the small IT Department, this is the perfect tool. It's easy to set up, easy to understand and customize as needed. The cost under Samanage was appropriate as well. Under SolarWinds, the cost has increased enough that we (small non-profit) may need to consider finding an alternative as they couldn't work with us at all on the price. Also, if an organization needs more robust, configurable reporting, they might need a more sophisticated program.

Overall satisfaction, needs some work on reporting details

Overall Satisfaction with Solarwinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage)