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

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are definitely not using SolarWinds to it's fullest capacity, and that is great. It offers the flexibility for us to pick and choose which features we want to implement (even within the Service Desk portion of the product) which has allowed us to scale easily. I have 4/10 departments utilizing the software successfully to act as a help desk for 450 employees.

Pros and Cons

Ability to streamline UI for various roles.
Extensive administrative settings and options.
AI to offer suggestions to techs and requesters.
Extremely transparent about any outages, causes, and steps to prevent again.
The system is very reliable: has only been inaccessible twice in the past 18 months of daily use.

Company will not accept reporting or other customization requests (consider it a new feature)
Reporting options are not intuitive & most cannot include details.
Little support from SolarWinds.

Return on Investment

Provided a robust platform on which to build our help desk support in-house.
Wish I could pick and choose features to pay for a little more.

Alternatives Considered

Freshdesk and Help Scout

SolarWinds pricing packages allowed an easier entry into the system, while others had either large upfront 'setup' fees. It was branded Samanage at the time, and it was able to offer the necessary features with an intuitive UI, reliable web-based hosting through AWS, a good amount of interface customization, and scalability by only paying per agent.

Support Rating

The transition from Samanage to SolarWinds after the purchase was very difficult. I went without a rep or any support for 6+ months. I am pretty self-sufficient in software. I finally got a hold of a VP to get me a rep (when I wanted to purchase more licenses I got a reply). The answer to almost every request has been no, even requests like "can this existing report be exported or scheduled with details." I will say that with service outages, they are extremely responsive through chat and have a ton of transparency.

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

Although we do not use many aspects of the system, Service Desk processes 2,000 incidents (tickets) per month. Our support team can easily track, assign, and reply to tickets. Screenshots/attachments are easy to add. We gained a higher adoption by allowing end-users to email in requests instead of just using the portal, which is a great feature.

Overall Satisfied for Service Desk Use

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)