Item: SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SolarWinds Service Desk as our incident management tool as well as our asset management tool. We have a small IT team so a cloud solution for service desk tickets fits us perfectly. We purchased it when it was still independent (Samanage). The asset management is great, does not have intrusive aspects on the computers we installed it on, and we have an accurate picture of what we have deployed. The portal view of tickets has also been great at increasing transparency into our activities, plus I am using it for my IT management reporting.

Pros and Cons

Service Desk tool - ability to create / update/ resolve tickets. Flow (ticket life cycle) can be customized, and notifications as well.
Asset Management - automatically gathers information from computers using an agent installed on the computers.
Reporting - ability to slice and dice tickets to get insight into most common problems.

Being a web platform, some of the refresh is problematic. Not sure this can be solved in the tool, it's important to have a clear understanding who owns the ticket.
Some time the performance / update speed is slow, but I have to give them credit, this has never resulted in an outage and in general it is solved within a couple of hours.

Return on Investment

As a replacement for a tool that was not widely used (BMC) this has improved accountability, response speed and the general perception of IT in the organization.
We have better visibility into the software installed.

Alternatives Considered

Asset Panda and BMC Track-It!

It was a combination of simplicity, cost and features that ended up why we chose Samanage.

Support Rating

Support is available on chat, and I have to say that they are always on top of things. We had some pretty specific questions and configurations and they were always quick and helpful. Some things cannot be done as expected (the tool is meant to be simple), but support was really helpful.

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

Works great for smaller IT teams, with fairly vanilla ticket workflows. Great for web access, there is even a mobile app available. Solarwinds Service Desk does not require a large amount of administration, and it's fairly intuitive. Brings great visibility into what is installed, as long as the agent is deployed correctly.

Works great for our law firm.

Overall Satisfaction with Solarwinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage)