Item: SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Rating: 9
Author: Matthaniel Cowell

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently only use Solarwinds Service Desk in the IT department and in collaboration with select IT related vendors. This platform allows us to maintain great records of all incidents, actions, changes, and inventories of our IT-related cases and products in one place. Service Desk helps us maintain great quality of service with our internal customers with alerts and reliable tracking of incidents and inventory.

Pros and Cons

Great API Interface
Now Very Customizable
Integrates well with G Suite
Reasonable Licensing Terms

GUI can be sometimes wonky, especially with newly added features.
Mass CSV Import feature through GUI can be cryptic and cumbersome. (Better to use the API if you can.)
Exclusively relies on custom email extensions to automatically create incidents from received emails (ex: support+whatever@domain.com) instead of reading a properties template for an email forwarded to special support email like Zendesk.
The "Remote Support" feature that integrates with LogMeIn and GoToAssist has never worked and SolarWinds support doesn't seem to know how to get this to work as explained in documentation.

Return on Investment

Allows us to track costs of our incidents, changes, and services.
We can easily analyze performance and efficiency of our resources.
Allows for reporting of costs of subscription services and purchase orders, which can be attached to each incident, request, or inventory item.

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk

Solarwinds Service Desk seems to offer more features and a more intuitive interface for our internal customers. While Zendesk may provide some slightly better usability features, Service Desk gives us great reporting and contains an inventory management tool where information about each computer in our company is documented and continuously updated automatically with service agent software can run on each device and some network scanning tools.

Support Rating

Their support is easy to access with a chatbox on every page and reasonably competent people manning it. Some things required escalation and multi-day responses. However, most things were able to be quickly solved. There were only a couple things I can remember where support basically said that what I was asking for wasn't possible, but that was rare.

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

G Suite, RingCentral, Google Hangouts Chat

Likelihood to Recommend

This platform is great for managing and tracking incidents, changes, inventory, and creating Support/FAQ articles for the organization. It might not be great for managing network diagrams or some other high-image-based documentation, though it will work. The feature set seems to be always expanding, so some stuff that may be lacking might be soon available.

A Mostly Good Platform

Overall Satisfaction with Solarwinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage)