What do you like best about SolarWinds Service Desk?
The ticketing and asset management being in the same place is the biggest thing for me. When an incident comes in I can tie it straight to an affected asset, see the warranty, the owner, the history, all without leaving the screen. That alone cuts out a lot of back and forth that used to happen when trying to piece together what was affected and who owned it. You can also add users and computers directly into the system rather than it just being a ticket logging tool, so it doubles up as a proper asset and user management platform which is more useful than it sounds until you are actually using it daily. Previously that information lived across spreadsheets and a separate system, pulling it together mid incident was genuinely painful.
The search functionality is something I use constantly. Searching ticket titles in speech marks gives you exact matches rather than a load of loosely related results, and the custom search queries let you filter down to exactly what you need quickly. Once you have built a useful query you can save it and come back to it, which sounds minor but when you are checking the same filtered views regularly it saves a surprising amount of time. Being able to build a view of everything assigned to your team, filtered by priority and open status, and just having that sat there ready is something you do not realise you needed until you have it.
When you are raising a new ticket it suggests related existing tickets as well, which has genuinely stopped us logging the same incident twice on busy days. That one caught me off guard when I first noticed it but it is something I rely on now. Nothing worse than two engineers working the same problem independently because nobody spotted the duplicate, especially when one of them has already found the fix.
Being able to clone changes is one of those features that does not sound impressive until you are actually doing it. Rather than rebuilding the same change template from scratch every time you just clone an existing one and adjust what you need. For repeat changes or similar maintenance tasks it takes something that used to take ten minutes of unnecessary admin down to about two. Over the course of a month that adds up.
The solutions section is well done and probably underrated. Articles are easy to find, you can link them directly to tickets, and they surface up when you are working on an incident so you are not hunting for them separately mid troubleshoot. We have built up a decent library of fixes over time and being able to attach the relevant solution directly to a closed ticket has also made it easier to spot patterns in recurring issues. If the same fix is being linked to ten tickets a month that tells you something needs addressing properly rather than just being patched each time.
The self service portal is cleaner than most and end users do actually use it, which cuts down on people emailing the helpdesk directly or sending a Teams message to whoever they happen to know. Having a proper place for users to raise requests and check the status of their tickets has reduced the amount of informal chasing the team has to deal with, which is a surprisingly big quality of life improvement.
The UI is simple and clean, not cluttered at all. New starters tend to pick it up quickly without much hand holding which is always a good sign, and the overall layout means you are not spending time figuring out where things are. It integrates well with Azure AD which keeps user provisioning tidy and means new starters are in the system without any manual work on our end. Performance has been solid throughout, not had issues with slowness or anything going down unexpectedly in normal use.
In terms of cost it is not the cheapest option out there but having asset management included rather than paying for it separately makes it reasonable value when you actually compare it properly against running two tools. The onboarding documentation is thorough enough that we did not need to lean on support much to get up and running, and when we did raise questions the support team were responsive and knew the product well rather than just pointing you back at the docs. The AI side surfaces relevant knowledge base articles when you are working a ticket which saves a bit of digging around, not ground-breaking but a genuine small time saver when you are dealing with a high volume of tickets and need to find the right solution quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about SolarWinds Service Desk?
The mobile app is available but fairly limited. It covers the basics for on the go but lacks some of the detail and functionality you get on the desktop, so for anything beyond a quick status update you end up jumping on a laptop anyway. For a team that occasionally needs to respond to something away from a desk it is passable but it could do with being fleshed out a bit more to be genuinely useful rather than just there. Things like viewing asset details tied to a ticket or checking SLA status are not great on mobile and those are things you actually want when you are out of the office dealing with something urgent.
The initial configuration takes a fair amount of time to get right. Things like custom fields, categories, SLA rules and approval workflows need proper thought up front otherwise you end up going back and adjusting things later when you realise something does not quite work the way you expected. It is not a tool you can just spin up and use straight away, you need to invest time at the start to get the most out of it. That is not necessarily a dealbreaker but it is worth knowing going in because if you underestimate that setup time it causes frustration down the line when things are not configured how the team actually works.
There is no straightforward way to do a post mortem on incidents. When something significant goes wrong you would expect to be able to pull together a structured summary of the timeline, impact, root cause and actions taken directly from the ticket, but there is nothing built in that guides you through that process or pre-populates relevant details. You end up doing it manually in a separate document which defeats the point of having everything in one place. A proper post mortem template linked to incidents with suggested fields pulling from the ticket data would be a really useful addition, especially for teams that have change advisory boards or need to report on major incidents formally.
Reporting could be more flexible. The built in reports cover the basics well enough but if you want something more tailored or specific you hit a wall fairly quickly. We have had situations where we needed a particular view of data that just was not possible without exporting and manipulating it elsewhere, which is not ideal when you are trying to pull something together quickly for a meeting. More granular customisation options in the reporting side would save a lot of that extra legwork and make it a much more complete tool. The dashboards are decent for day to day visibility but anything beyond standard ticket volume and SLA metrics requires more effort than it should.
The pricing tiers can feel a bit restrictive depending on what you need. Some features that most teams would consider fairly standard, things like custom fields and more advanced API access, are gated behind the higher plans. If you only need one or two things from the next tier up it can feel like you are paying a significant jump in cost for a small number of additional features, which is a frustrating position to be in. It is worth mapping out exactly what you need before committing to a plan because it is easy to start on a lower tier and then realise fairly quickly that something you rely on is not included.
Duplicate ticket management beyond the suggestion on creation could also be better. The tool suggests related tickets when you are raising a new one which is useful, but once tickets are in the system merging or linking duplicates that have slipped through is more manual than it should be. On a busy day when a widespread issue comes in and multiple tickets get raised before anyone spots the pattern, tidying that up takes more effort than it needs to. A smarter way of identifying and consolidating duplicates after the fact would be a genuine improvement.
The knowledge base and solutions section is good but the tooling around maintaining it is fairly basic. There is no built in way to flag articles that are out of date, prompt for reviews or track whether a solution is actually being used effectively. Keeping it accurate relies entirely on the team being proactive about it, and in a busy environment that tends to slip. Some kind of automated prompting to review articles that have not been updated in a while would help keep the quality of the solutions library up without it needing someone to manually audit everything periodically. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
