SolarWinds Service Desk Erfahrungen

Great software, have used this at two different firms now. Simple and easy with great reliability and reporting.

We have reduced email congestion for our team and streamlined ticket requests for our media services department.

Samanage's software is the 5th HelpDesk software package I have used in my professional career of 20 years. It has some nice features, including the automated inventory for Windows workstations, and the ability to setup custom SLA's. But that is where the positive end.

Things I don't care for are outdated "help" articles in their support portal, written by their own staff, that are inaccurate, and wasted over two days of my time trying to implement something that I discovered didn't work, then when I flag their support, I get a brief apology. Support is terrible, if they cannot write and police their own articles for accuracy. I don't appreciate organizations that cause more work for organizations using their product.

The system does not allow for UNC paths to be set as links in the system. This prevents our organization from sending "clickable" link to help staff add printers, map drives, etc. Only hyperlinks that go to the web are able to be made clickable.

Searches are another headache. While it is nice that it searches across everything to yield results, you have no method to filter the results returned to a date range or the ability to sort the results by a certain field.

We also had to take their supplied agent (for automated inventory), and build our own MSI package for deployment. Unsure why they are not able to do this themselves, but it is frustrating.

No native iOS app is available, for the technicians to use, and using the HTML 5.0 interface is clunky and not very useful on iOS devices.

The software has a lot of potential, but still needs a lot of work.

In summary, SolarWinds Service Desk is a great tool for managing IT operations, but it comes with a high price tag and a steep learning curve. It may not be the best fit for small businesses or those with limited IT resources. However, for larger organizations or those that need a robust and feature-rich ITSM solution, it can be an excellent choice.

SolarWinds Service Desk is a cloud-based IT service management (ITSM) platform designed to help organizations streamline and automate their IT support operations. The platform offers a range of features, including incident management, problem management, change management, and knowledge management, making it a popular choice for IT teams and support organizations.

Everyday use is a breeze and never a chore.

It has been very encouraging. Working with such a great team definitely takes the stress out of worry about what ifs.

The pricing is based upon the number of users in our network that will be accessing the system, and the number of "Managers" running the system.

The salesman were very helpful in providing a great offer on the cost and have kept that pricing concept since we started.

As you are starting out with basically a "Blank Page" it can seem a little overwhelming at first setting everything up to get that final functional asset management and help desk system you envision. However, there are plenty of examples and their help & support is very responsive.

To me, this "Blank Page" is one of the positive aspects of the system. Basically, with some limitations, if I can imagine it, I can build it with what they have provided. This is true if you keep in mind what the original system was designed for in the first place. (The point here is simply: you would be surprised what kind of things people have asked the system to do... way beyond the scope of its design...)

It easily integrates with Active Directory (AD based on Windows 2003 is no longer supported as of this writing) and has a robust permissions setup, allowing you to allow and deny users any number of "Roles" that are pre-configured or that you create as needed.

The easy deployment of the agent combined with the cloud based setup allows the system to work well with users and machines working both in the corporate network, as well as outside of it in satellite offices.

The "Trouble Ticketing" interface can be customized and is easy to understand and navigate. Background elements include the ability to track tickets, warn administrators of tickets that have received no response, cluster common tickets to users and machines for trend and trouble tracking, and provides what I call "Live Response", where you can see who is looking at a specific ticket or item and see their notations instantly.

Probably the most impressive portion of the system is that part that most users will never see: The asset management system.

Once the agent has been installed and is communicating, the amount of information provided is overwhelming at first, and yet still organized and categorized. There is even a built in tool allowing the system to know when a computers warranty is up.

My reason for not giving 5 stars across the board:

The system sometimes has issues tracking software as the "Suite" it is licensed under. This is not necessarily and issue with this system as it is in how it is sold.

They have been a great partner to work with bending over backwards to accommodate us in our mergers and acquisitions as we consolidated tenants and imported and exported data. They listened to our feedback and incorporated some of our ideas into their final product as well. They are a company that will work with you to get the job done the way you need it done.

Benefits:
1. Its easy to use and looks nice. Staff have required very little training, despite not having a centralized system.
2. Its pretty flexible. It's able to do about 90% of what we want it to do.
3. Support is active and engaged. Their community website has a lot of activity, both from others using the product as well as comments from Samanage's support.
4. Its actively developed. Recently Samanage unveiled their Labs feature, which allows areas to enable or disable new features to test out their functionality prior to implementation.
5. Reliability. Being a cloud service, you need it to be available and accessible. We've only had one minor outage during our time with Samange, and that was resolved quickly. They also provide great visibility into their uptime through a website, http://status.samanage.com

Problems:
1. Filtering. Filters for incidents need additional work to become more robust. Currently, each new filter type acts as an AND filter, while multiple of the same type of filter act as OR filters. In some cases, you can't achieve the type of filter required at all.
2. Reporting. While the built-in reporting looks nice and has some decent out-of-the-box reports, it's not at the level of sophistication most organizations really need to get their full value out of this product and the data it has. For instance, there is no query builder or ad-hoc reporting, so you're limited to what you see.
3. Groups and Roles. Groups are treated like individuals, so if you report on a group's incidents and one of the members in that group has an incident, you won't see it, which is challenging. Roles are pretty robust, but a person can only belong to one role. If you have exceptions for individuals, you basically need to create a special role for each one of those cases which won't scale for large organizations.
4. SLA's and automation. The current SLA implementation is restrictive and cumbersome. And that's pretty much the only way to provide any sort of automation to routing, closing, etc. for incidents.
5. Slow feature development. Samanage has done an excellent job of rolling out various features throughout the year. However, there are some long-standing feature requests that have been in development for years and executing on them has been slow.

While the above issues are a concern, I have faith they'll be addressed and result in a stronger product in the long run.

I've had a great experience with SW SD. As a developer the ability to create workflows and use the API has made this tool indispensable. It is also extremely helpful when trying to track down a problem that may have occurred in the past or is similar to something we're currently dealing with.

Overall, it's a great software that is well made and enables you to customize it easily even without coding. every company will love working with that.

For some organizations, selling the idea to have an ITSM can be difficult. They helped me to build the case and to sell the idea, they supported me in the whole process.

Once they sold me the product, they showed an awesome customer service with very short turnaround time for each support request. They have a strong and active community, which is very important to share ideas and problems. The errors that I found were solved quickly and they also hear their users, by giving us the ability to push for ideas to include in the system.

The inventory management is great in details and features.

Some Improvement Opportunities
So far, some improvements opportunities that I see can be around the SLAs which could be more flexible (structured as Target->Action, there could be more for each of them), but is not really a problem.

The reports could be more flexible by allowing the user to build his own reports, and scheduling the reports to be sent to specific users

The asset agent deployment for linux is a bit tricky and could be improved a lot. Mac and Windows are very straightforward and easy to install.

There are and will be a number of things not covered by the product, but what they showed me so far by evolving partially from what the users propose and how fast they evolve, gives me the confidence I need to rest assure that everything that I need will eventually be there.

Pros
An awesome customer service and support.

Great asset management.

Good set of reports and dashboard capability.

SLA are great at the level we use it, you can specify different targets and actions.

Ability to configure different times zones and business hours of all your company sites, we have 4 offices with different times zones and so far that's working great!

Allowed us to configure a service catalog, to capture and structure common requests from our users, like the request of Virtual Machines, where they always missed some data we needed.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something but so far, our experience has been great, I would totally recommend this product!

It was my first help desk product and has been one of my favorites sense. Besides controller restrictions and how that can impeded closing a ticket, it worked great and, at its core, was a strong helpdesk product that removed the overbearing micromanagement you might see in other options.

*Solar wind is one stop for a managed service desk tool.
*IT has numerous feature associated within, one among is solarwinds network monitoring. Usually organization will have a different tool for network monitoring itself but solarwinds provides access to this future without needing to have different tool.
*Easy to access and multiple means of ticket creation and tracking.

Easy to configure and get set up. Love the agent on our computers so we get real-time insights on our assets. Everyone we've worked with at Samanage has been responsive and helpful. We started with the asset management, and now are about to expand to the service desk which looks like it has some awesome features we plan to utilize right away like workflows and Jira integration. Wish the reporting was more robust so we could automate any report we want, but we're still able to get at what we need through saved lists/searches.

The service desk has changed the IT department in a good way. We are not duplicating work (as much), we are held accountable for the things we are doing, and we are able to see if there are reoccurring issues withing the agency to know that it may be a bigger problem than one isolated incident.

Saves time and makes it easier to manage service desk requests.

We improved our SLAs using SAManage as an Incidents platform.
We also now have a better understanding of the number of endpoints we have, the software installed on them etc'.