Item: SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Rating: 9
Author: Kevin Staton

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Solarwinds Service Desk across the organization for:

Office experience and building maintenance incidents
IT incidents
Forms-based approvals
Business process improvement
Vendor and contract management

As a mid-sized company, many of our processes were previously informal. Solarwinds Service Desk helped us create process workflows for many requests that were previously difficult to track and measure. The reporting tools give a much more holistic view of these requests for decision-makers and give users more transparency into the process.

Additionally, the vendor and contract management modules help us track contract expiration on everything from SaaS licensing to hardware and consulting contracts. We also use vendor and contract management to gather and store security-related documentation such as PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and Privacy Policies. We store these with the vendor so that we have a central repository of all security compliance documentation.

Pros and Cons

Incident Management
Process Workflow
Vendor and Contract Management
A welcoming landing page

There is potential to greatly improve the capacity for cascading attributes. Currently, categories are limited to a top-level category and one subcategory. This leaves a fairly shallow decision tree.
Greater flexibility to modify the layout of incident request forms.
More integration options for cloud file-sharing platforms. Solarwinds Service Desk has tie-ins to Dropbox but not other vendors.

Return on Investment

With SLAs, better reporting, and a single incident portal, the productivity of both service desk staff and users has improved. Incidents are tracked and responded to more quickly and fewer incidents "fall through the cracks".
Purchasing approval workflow has focused technology purchasing priorities.
Tracking contract expiration ensures services stay available.

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk, ServiceNow and Spiceworks

We have used Zendesk, ServiceNow, Spiceworks, and TeamDynamix. Zendesk lacked features like vendor and contract management but offered a competitive price. ServiceNow and TeamDynamix are more full-featured ITSM tools with more features but not cost-effective for our organization. Those tools are also highly customizable, which is great, but also an impediment to standing up a solution quickly and at low cost. Solarwinds Service Desk offered most of the features we were looking for with our budget.

Support Rating

The onboarding and configuration process was very thorough, and we had a resource dedicated to deployment. Whenever we have had a question or issue, Solarwinds Service Desk support has been quick to respond.

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

Other Software Used

OneLogin, KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training, Communifire by Axero Solutions

Likelihood to Recommend

Solarwinds Service Desk strikes a good balance between cost and features. If you're an organization without any tools for incident management, process workflows, or vendor management, then Solarwinds Service Desk will be a huge improvement. Service Desk has more features than other products in the same tier. We compared Solarwinds Service Desk to Zendesk but found that Zendesk was missing key capabilities.

For larger organizations or organizations with more sophisticated project management, dashboard, incident management, asset tracking needs... as well as larger budgets... something like ServiceNow or TeamDynamix would be a better choice.

The key takeaway for Solarwinds Service Desk is that it has many features at a fraction of the cost of the big players in this space. It won't be as customizable as the more expensive models but it will help you mature your ITSM and help with organization wide process improvement.

Solarwinds Service Desk - ITSM on a Budget

Overall Satisfaction with Solarwinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage)