Web Help Desk Will Help Your I.T. Staff Be The Most Popular People In Your Organization

We deployed SolarWinds Web Help Desk in a school district for use by teachers and administrators to report issues with technology in our district. The Tech Department (6 people) access the technician side, while just about 800 teachers and administration staff access the client portion of the system. The only people who do not have access to put in tickets are the students - they have to ask teachers to report the issues directly to us. It really helps get a handle on what issues are occurring, the frequency with which they occur, and which people we can count on to give us the best information.

We tried out several different options, and a lot of them were really good. That being said, the pricing schemes for several ticketing systems can be a little cost-prohibitive. We probably would have kept looking at different alternatives if we had more time to do so. Time was a big factor in our decision making as we wanted to avoid the renewal with Assist. We would have probably tried more than 4 or 5 solutions, and definitely would have dedicated more than 2 or 3 weeks on each individual product, if we had the opportunity.

Web Help Desk was super easy to pickup without training. I would absolutely recommend doing it this way as you learn the ins and outs of the interface and how to use it simply by playing around. You need to take the time to dig through the menus and see what is where and how Web Help Desk relates to your existing solution and what changes you need to make to your process to strike the right balance between end-user convenience and technician abilities.

My only recommendation is to take the time to walk through every single menu and sub menu that is available for you to examine in the administration portion of the website. I cannot comment on your specific configurations of course, but every time we needed to tweak the system for a problem, we have found a method available to use in the interface. Examples include changing the Email server timeouts to allow for the system to 'catch up' during busy periods, and changing the default so that clients cannot close tickets out manually after they've been assigned to a technician (forcing them to contact us so we don't waste a trip).

Be sure to setup proper Database Backups from within the General menu. It is important to note that the basic Linux VM has limited hard drive space, so setting up a remote share that the VM can talk to in order to do off-pc backups is a great idea (which was recommended to us by SolarWinds Support). Also of note is that by default Web Help Desk gets about a C on the Qualys SSL Security Scan tool and had problems in Chrome due to weak Diffie-Hellman Certificates. A quick Google search will show you the Web Help Desk Support forums have several cipher suites which can be used to get better scores on the scan tool and address the weak Diffie-Hellman issue.

In February of 2015 at around 3:00pm , our Web Help Desk database apparently became corrupt or missing. We were, understandably, very concerned. At 3:18pm I put in an urgent ticket with SolarWinds. By 3:27pm I was on the phone with a representative who was eager to help get us back up and running. They remote controlled my desktop to gain access to the VM and after a quick glance through our log files determined that our drive had just run out of space because the backups weren't being cycled properly. He took the time to fix the problem (by removing temp files and some REALLY old backups) then got our system back up and running. He then showed us how to get a proper rotation for backups setup. We asked about doing a network backup and he provided a method to make this work. It was a great experience overall, and I believe the representative went above and beyond by helping us future proof a problem that we had obviously created.

My advice would simply to be: read, read, read, read. SolarWinds has documented a lot of their features and how to properly implement them. If you don't take the time to read through the documentation and look through the setup then you will encounter problems. Imports have to follow VERY specific guidelines or they WILL fail (either with no import, bad import data, or duplicate import data). If you are confused, do not hesitate to contact support. They will help. If you feel confident that you've got it mostly figured out and just need a few tips, then use Google to find the SolarWinds Support Forums --- people there have posted lots of fixes and are always able to point you in the right direction.

Always provide them with all the information you have available regarding the topic. They are more than willing to help you figure out if the product will support the ideas you are trying to accomplish. If you haven't heard back from them, update the ticket to request any information that you might need (I've only had to do this once, they've been very much on top of it whenever we have reported an issue).