SolarWinds Web Help Desk Reviews

For Zoho, we did OP Manager, Audit Security, AD Security and Asset Management, Patch Management. These things we are dealing with Zoho.

We are not dealing with solutions such as Zoho Mail or Zoho Projects; we are basically into cybersecurity. We are more focused on cybersecurity, patch management, and ticketing tools or those kinds of solutions.

For ticketing tools, we have done TeamViewer, SolarWinds Web Help Desk, Zoho, Happyfox. These are the tools we have given to customers.

Regarding SolarWinds Web Help Desk, that's the ticketing tool for on-premises in SolarWinds.

Basically, for approval requirements, our clients are using SolarWinds Web Help Desk, which they requested for a ticket workflow that has approval for some of the ticket requests. For example, if they need a change in an application or if they need a change in infra devices or peripheral devices, they needed to get the approval for their HOD in the respective departments. Instead of going for each license, we chose to integrate their LDAP and assign particular users as HODs. We were able to achieve that approval workflow for them. If any major changes are required by the users or required by the organization's employee, they need to raise a ticket with which the help desk team won't be responding to the ticket unless that particular department HOD is approving the request. Once the request gets approval, then the help desk team or IT team will be able to support with the particular ticket.

Apart from that, we also look for some logs as reports generation on daily basis logs. That kind of reports was available with SolarWinds Web Help Desk.

The biggest advantage for SolarWinds Web Help Desk is the user interface. We were able to configure a different UI for administrators, employees, and HODs based on their hierarchy level. The second advantage was we were able to get scheduled reports on daily basis on how tickets have been addressed and their status.

Compared to other tools, it was doing the same functionality. They were using TeamViewer as a ticketing tool, so we replaced it with SolarWinds Web Help Desk, and we also helped them to integrate the ticketing solution with the teams for doing the remote support.

Areas of improvement can be enhanced regarding configuration. We had the deployment metrics and usability, ease of use, and ease of access. These were the three functionalities we were looking for in any ticketing solution. For this specific product, we were able to achieve ease of access for users, but not for the administrators. The working part, the deployment part, and the configuration part was a little bit complex.

I have been working with this product for more than two or three years.

In these kinds of solutions, we need to purchase the user account licenses properly for scalability; that has to be planned correctly. Without that, if you go for any ticketing solution, most of them need to buy the license for the users who will be creating the ticket. In this case, it was not required, which is a pro for SolarWinds Web Help Desk.

Regarding technical support of SolarWinds Web Help Desk, the support is great. They responded promptly, and the engineers were very informative; they were able to understand the problem and give a prompt response.

Positive

Regarding installation, to an extent, it was complex, but after we got some support from the SolarWinds Web Help Desk team, we were able to accomplish it.

There is absolutely a return on investment. I can say it's about money saving because other solutions required more investment. With this solution, we were able to achieve the same use case with less cost; you can count it on the money factor, not on the time.

Regarding pricing, the solution is not too expensive and not very affordable. On the scale of 1 to 10, I can rate it as five to six; it's average.

We actually do the reselling. We created a self-service portal for the customers, and this particular function does impact reducing IT staff workload overall.

From technical standpoints, comparing SolarWinds Web Help Desk with TeamViewer, we need ease of configuration and ease of allocating, creating new fields or creating new layouts for many specific use cases. An organization can have a number of use cases when it comes to a ticketing tool. It's not a security solution; it's more of a service solution where you will be configuring the needed categories and needed fields for each department.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate SolarWinds Web Help Desk an 8.

SolarWinds Web Help Desk is a case management system. Each user logs their concerns or problems into the portal, which are then assigned to one of our support engineers responsible for managing the IT department. With this system, we can track issues, generate reports, collect feedback, and conduct surveys.

SolarWinds supports case and incident reporting. This includes logging incidents and tracking them efficiently. Additionally, it is compatible and approved by the ITIL foundation and standards, meeting world-class standards.

Some features in the product are supposed to run. However, if they don't, it may require some time to configure or fix them, such as asset management. We have been struggling with asset management in SolarWinds Web Help Desk. The software offers a range of features that we haven't fully utilized, such as inventory management and an approval system. While we are utilizing the asset management functionality, there have been some defects that need addressing.

Some users prefer to have another big interface, but unfortunately, this option is not available in SolarWinds Web Help Desk.

I have been using SolarWinds Web Help Desk for two years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable and highly beneficial. We have serving a hospital with over three thousand employees. 

Customer support is satisfactory. There's a feature for escalating cases whenever there's a delay from support engineers. They escalate to higher-tier engineers, which has significantly improved our workflow. They are responsive and  available 24/7.

Positive

"The initial setup is straightforward and can be completed by our team without the need of additional support from the vendor for implementation services. The installation guide was straightforward. It takes three days to deploy, depending on the requirements. Two people are required for the deployment.

The implementation provide significant time savings. Previously, we were managing email and phone call requests manually, but now we have streamlined these processes within the system.

The pricing is based on the volume of customers or users utilizing the product.

SolarWinds Web Help Desk could be beneficial for generating automated responses, such as ONIQ. Since we receive multiple cases from similar backgrounds, it would streamline the process if the system could recognize if a case has been previously addressed and suggest a solution to the end user.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use this for our ticketing system for all the departments, not just IT but Data, HR, maintenance, etc. 

It provides us with a ticketing system, which is crucial for IT and the other departments, to keep track of the work that we do. 

It has a pretty good search function. If you do the advanced search, you can basically search for anything in any field. If I do a search on the "request" field, that will search the whole body of the ticket so I just put in some search terms of something I think is in the ticket. By doing that, I can usually find the ticket that I'm looking for.

The interface feels clunky to me compared to some other systems that I've used. I used ManageEngine Service Desk prior to this at my previous job and that had stuff like categories that we use that I don't see in SolarWinds. It was a little more intuitive to use as far as understanding how to respond in the ticket and get an email to go to the user, things like that. This is less intuitive as far as understanding how to use the interface.

It could be more intuitive, it doesn't have as many features has either Service Desk did or ServiceNow, which I used prior to Service Desk.

It doesn't have a way to put PCs into it and tie to the user or ticket that I can see. In both ServiceNow and Service Desk, you can have your PCs in it and then tie that to the user or the ticket. 

The program seems buggy to me. Not infrequently, when I click to add a Note, the Notes section disappears instead of opening a box to add a Note. So then I have to close and reopen the view of the ticket and try again. And sometimes I have to try 2 or 3 times to make a change in a ticket and save it, as it doesn't save the change. This is particularly true when selecting an option from a dropdown, such as selecting a tech for the ticket or selecting "closed" to change the ticket status. I select the option then click the save button and it doesn't save the option. So then I have to select it again and click on save. Sometimes I have to do this 3 times before it sticks and saves it. 

The other issue that some of us encounter is that the Refresh will change itself from "1 minute" to "Disabled" and then it stops refreshing the view so that we no longer see new tickets. So we then have to manually change the refresh back to "1 minute". 

I've been using SolarWinds since I've been at my organization, which is three and a half years. The organization has had it longer. 

We use the most recent version that we run ourselves on our server, not a cloud or hosted version. 

It's fairly stable, sometimes late in the day it will stop responding and I have to restart the server, but that's not a frequent occurrence. I

It seems pretty scalable to me. We're not a huge organization, we only have 700 some employees, but it seems to be able to handle quite a few tickets.

I haven't really dealt with technical support, that's dealt with more by my coworker who is more expert on this.

They charge by the technician. It costs $117 per technician per year. I think that's cheaper than Service Desk or ServiceNow.

I don't think there are any additional costs.

My advice would to definitely look at the interface and make sure that you like the interface. I don't really like the interface compared to Service Desk, it was jarring to switch from Service Desk to Web Help Desk when I changed positions. Now I'm used to it, it doesn't bother me anymore, but I really did not like it when I first started using it. You should definitely look at the interface and make sure that you like the interface.

In the next release, I would like to see categories and an improved UI. I don't know if it provides an interface for end-users or not, if it does, we don't use that. It would be nice for it to have a good interface for end-users, we just have people send emails that create tickets which is what we also did with Service Desk at my last job. I think having a web interface for the user to submit a ticket is a nice idea.

I would rate SolarWinds Web Help Desk a six out of ten. Mainly because of the interface and some of the functionality that it doesn't have that we had in the other solutions I tried.

I am a consultant, and we are implementors. 

SolarWinds Web Help Desk is used mostly for monitoring purposes.

They use Power BI for the reporting.

It is easy to use.

They can build on providing product knowledge to the sales teams. They are not familiar with all of the product capabilities, or the comparison between similar products.

I don't feel that we receive an adequate amount of help or cooperation from technical support.

We would like to see automation included in the next release. We would like to eliminate the L1 and L2 support, by at least 80%. To do this, we need automation with AI (Artificial Intelligence) in combination with ML (Machine Learning).

As an example, consider that we are monitoring a storage system, particular server storage, that is going to breach its threshold very soon. Based on the learning of the day-to-day running, or day-to-day transactions, it should be able to understand that there is a number of GBs occupying spaces every day and a number of GBs left over, and within another 10 days or 15 days, it will breach the threshold. 

I should be notified on whether there is a place for me in the storage and some other LUN where I can provide the storage for it. Otherwise, I have to order another storage system. 

This is the kind of automation we are looking at.

SolarWinds is a stable solution.

I found that the technical support from SolarWinds was not really very good. Technical support is a bit difficult.

The technical support of ServiceNow and ManageEngine is good and they were professional.

The sales team does not have a feature-by-feature comparison with other products or their competitors.

We had an issue where the alerts were not being diverted through the email. We had a difficult time trying to resolve this issue. We raised a ticket and after almost two weeks, we found a solution for the issue. SolarWinds did not assist us in this issue.

This left a black mark or a gray area with the technical support. The technical team is not competent, or available, and they do not know the product. It was frustrating and surprising for us. We were under the impression that the technical team would be trained, experienced, and have knowledge of the product.

I have also worked with ManageEngine, as well as Nagios. We primarily use Nagios for monitoring, whereas ManageEngine is used as a ServiceDesk tool, and ServiceNow is used for both a monitoring tool as well as a ServiceDesk tool.

ServiceNow has a large number of features that make it difficult to install and use.

We have completed several migrations, including those from Remedy to ServiceNow, ServiceNow to ManageEngine, and Micro Focus to Manage Engine.

The initial setup of ServiceNow is complex. You can't just install it and start using it. You need some training.

SolarWinds and Manage Engine are pretty straightforward.

A person who is not in IT, but has some good ITSM knowledge will be able to configure it directly on SolarWinds, and Manage Engine.

When you compare with ManageEngine and ServiceNow, SolarWinds is reasonable.

The licensing fees are fine.

We were requested to compare SolarWinds, ManageEngine, and ServiceNow to see which one we should recommend to them.

We are evaluating license, cost, simplicity of use, and whether the software is implemented in the cloud or on-premises.

The three are similar. There are no differences other than reporting.

I have worked with and configured SolarWinds, but I am not yet acquainted with all of its features. I haven't looked into all of them.

Overall, I would rate SolarWinds Web Help Desk a six out of ten.

It is a standard technical ticket raising.

It would be good if there were training and tutorial videos on the Web Help Desk. There are videos on the website, but it would be handy if they were on the Web Help Desk.

We have been using this solution for more than five years, but some of our customers have used it longer. It is deployed on cloud.

All the SolarWinds products are very stable. Once installed, it runs like a charm and doesn't ever crash.

It is a scalable solution, and we have about 60 users. We only need one person, an engineer, for deployment and maintenance.

The technical support is very responsive and relevant. They do a really good level one and two support. They redirect level two to the corresponding product engineers, and they're very good.

The initial setup of the product took 40 minutes.

The licensing is cheap.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice to others, there's no need to do a proof of concept, you can try the solution and then subscribe to it.

My primary use is to connect web applications through VPN.

I've been using SolarWinds for four to five years.

SolarWinds is stable, we haven't faced any problems with it.

SolarWinds is scalable as far as adding devices and servers. However, we were informed that in order to upgrade, we needed to completely reinstall it (this may have had to do with us not performing any upgrades during the two or three years following the initial installation).

SolarWinds is a very good application that provides you with a detailed monitoring capability of your network and assets. However, it's a little outdated compared to newer products that include protection and detection. I'd rate this solution as seven out of ten.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we provide to our customers.

This solution is primarily used as a ticketing system, and for asset management.

The deployment model varies based on the customer's requirements, although most of the deployments are on-premises.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the assets management module. They correlate the assets with the user, and you can see the history of each asset, each transaction, and each feature for every individual user.

The system can automatically create scheduled tasks, for example, maintenance every month or every week, based on tickets.

The GUI for this solution can be better.

This solution needs to have mobile application support added.

I have used this solution in production environments and it is stable.

In my experience, I have used this solution in SMBs and large corporations, but I am not sure if it is enterprise-grade. For SMBs and large businesses, it is fine.

There are two types of users for this solution. There are technicians and there are end-users. My customers have medium-sized teams who use this solution, and it depends on their requirements.

I normally get my support for this solution from the community. There are references available on the internet. I have not contacted technical support.

I have experience with other solutions such as ManageEngine, but I choose the product which best matches the requirements.

There is a setup wizard that takes you through the installation, step-by-step, and you can do it on your own without any special knowledge.

The implementation then requires time and tuning according to the project requirements. This includes integrating other applications that you may have, setting up your procedures, assets, and users. I categorize these items as an orientation process, and it takes a little bit of time to complete.

The application will be online in about thirty minutes.

This is a good solution, but the GUI is really old-fashion and needs to be updated. I can use it, and it meets my requirements, but I expect it to be better.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

• User interface
• Ticket management, including assigning techies, workflows, opening & closing of tickets, and the knowledge base
• Asset management
• Ticket dashboards

The ease of integration between various aspects like network management and asset management.

Dashboards need some amount of work to be done. Ease of customization is desired.

I have used it for over two years.

I have not encountered any deployment issues; it was very straightforward.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. The solution scales well; currently is working for 60 help desk technicians (IT and non-IT) for over 2,000 users. IT technicians are from four domains: LAN, WAN, security, and desktops. Non-IT technicians include groups like admin, gate pass support, and facilities.

Customer service is fairly good.

Technical support is good.

We previously used a home-grown solution that was replaced, owing to a lack of development effort.

Initial setup was very straightforward. We just needed to plan our deployment well to ensure that we don't encounter pitfalls going ahead.

It is one of the simplest licensing mechanisms and probably reasonable.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. We chose SolarWinds WHD to ensure a tight integration with other SolarWinds solutions like NPM, SAM, etc.