SolarWinds Service Desk Reviews

We are in the pharmaceutical industry and have implemented samanage over 2 years ago. The system is perfect and easy to use which enables users to understand the problem and submit tickets!

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Things I don't care for are outdated "help" articles in their support portal, written by their own staff, that are inaccurate, and wasted over two days of my time trying to implement something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.

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

Solarwinds service desk is used and responsible for solarwinds services like syslog and traps services etc.

So far, i have had a great time using Solarwinds products especially Service Desk..

Great ITSM alternative to the big guys, with all the same features, without the price tag. They offer a full feature trial and will help you with a PoC. Great value, positive ROI and superior TOC. Have a look at this one!

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.

We using Samanage for service desk and inventory, from 2015, we were like the first customer, we give a lot of ideas for them to improve the product. We now using Samanage for IT, Operation and HR department, for the next time we may offer to another department like Business Office. We have the plan to do some application using Samanage API for improve reporting.

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

We are getting much more accurate reports for identifying trends in end-user troubles. We have improved incident tracking and overall customer satisfaction.

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'.