Item: SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Rating: 10
Author: Alan Hill

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Solarwinds Service Desk for a number of activities in our organization. These include, incident and change management, service catalog requests, and inventory monitoring. Currently, we use it mostly in IT but have recently started using it with compliance and have plans to move its use into other areas where task-based work is done that can benefit from workflow and scheduling.

Pros and Cons

Incident Management - tracking categories/sub-categories by site or organization. Notifications to the user as well as those cc'd on the incident
Change Management - allows for standard identification of change, test and rollback plans, tasks and some workflow with approvals
Inventory allows for risk identification, asset tag activities, one can see what software is installed, associate incidents with that asset

Reporting is in my mind a bit basic
API needs some work also. Why can I not create a saved report and then execute that report from an API call?

Return on Investment

We were running around with our hair on fire from one emergency to another without any way to measure what was happening. Solarwinds Service Desk has allowed us to get a handle on the support issues occurring in the organization, communicate better with users and stakeholders, and measure what we do. Before implementing this tool, I could not tell anyone how many incidents we received, how many were resolved, and what categories of issues our users were having. That has all changed.

Alternatives Considered

Spiceworks, Freshdesk, and their ITSM product. Both of those products are limited in their scope and difficult to implement. Solarwinds Service Desk was easy to implement and their implementation team got us to production quickly and with little fuss or changes since. We just use the product, we don't have to manage the tool.

Support Rating

Their support team is responsive and being that I have little or no opinion about them tells me that I don't have to use them often and when I do the issue is fixed. In this case, no opinion is a good opinion.

Key Insights

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

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for creating an ITSM program at your organization without having to have in-depth expertise in ITSM or its associated frameworks like ITIL.
It does not provide for much automation and management with regards to your hardware assets. You will need another tool for that and there may be integrations and other Solarwinds products for that and I'm unaware of them.

ITSM Out of the Box

Overall Satisfaction with Solarwinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage)