Item: SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Solarwinds Service Desk for two main purposes:

Access Request Forms: for when a new or existing user is requesting access to our various IT systems.
Helpdesk Tickets: For when end users are in need of IT support.

The product is administered by our IT Dept but is used by all personnel throughout the organization. Using Solarwinds Service Desk allows us to address the problem of being able to meet our compliance and audit requirements. While there are many "service desk" products on the market, Solarwinds Service Desk was the only one we've found that allows for a hierarchy of approvals to be documented in each ticket or request.

Pros and Cons

Approval flows: You can have multiple layers of approval required for the tickets and service requests you design. This helps us show auditors that access to privileged systems and data was formerly reviewed and approved by the appropriate managers.
Easy to design forms: You don't need to spend hours reading the documentation to figure out how to create forms. It's simple enough that you can just jump right in and start creating them with minimal training.
Lots of options and features are available for you to include in your forms.
Integrates well with SAML-based SSO and has capabilities for MFA.
Easy and useful search function. Need to find that ticket from last year that you worked for a particular user or issue? Just search by keyword or username, and it'll quickly find the ticket.

The layout of the forms doesn't make good use of all the space on the page. Specifically, all the text is constrained to a small area on the side of the page, while 80% of the page is just blank space. It forces you to type everything into a small box.
You can't delete old users, you can only disable them. The disabled users don't count towards your license, but if you work for a company with lots of turnover, it's really annoying when most of the people on the "users" screen don't even work there anymore. Thankfully you can filter out the inactive users, but still, why can't I just delete them?

Return on Investment

It's allowed us to meet our compliance requirements.
The licensing is per IT Admin, not per end-user, so it's quite affordable and provided lots of ROI.
It helps us track issues, changes, and access to systems.

Alternatives Considered

Jira Service Desk

We already use Jira Software, so we also evaluated Jira Service Desk, since it would have integrated quite easily and been a lower cost than Solarwinds Service Desk. We found that Jira Service Desk was mainly a "cookie cutter" product, where there was very little capability for creating your own custom forms with useful features. You basically needed to rely on the generic forms that were already built-into the product.

Support Rating

We haven't had to contact support many times, but when we have, they were always prompt, pleasant, and helpful. If you're looking for help designing your forms, support will point you in the direction of the proper documentation, but they're not going to do the work for you. They have professional services that can help with such things instead, for an additional fee.

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

Atlassian Confluence, Jira Software, G Suite

Likelihood to Recommend

Solarwinds Service Desk is well suited for scenarios where you need one or more of the following:

Complex form features that go beyond forms where you simply type text into a box.
The ability to create complex menus in your forms, using multiple variables.
An audit trail showing who did what with a request or ticket.
An approvals flow, showing that requests are formally approved by the designated approvers.

Solarwinds Service Desk is probably not well suited for scenarios where you just need a simple ticket system that doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles.

Highly customizable forms and features. Also, great for companies with compliance/audit requirements

Overall Satisfaction with Solarwinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage)