Incident Management
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Simplify your ticketing system with incident management solutionsToday’s employees are mobile—they might work from home, from the beach, or from the airplane. On-the-go employees need a way to streamline ticket submission without limitations from their service providers. With SolarWinds® Service Desk, increased collaboration from one service provider to the next gives your employees flexibility. There’s no need for different incident management solutions for different departments. You can easily manage tickets submitted via email, phone calls, a service portal, mobile app, chat, email, phone calls, or even in person. |
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Automate IT incident management across the companyYour organization can operate much more quickly with a unified way to meet employee service demands. The right incident management solution gives your service and support teams automated rules to eliminate simple tasks, route tickets to the right people, and resolve incidents more quickly. The quicker you get your resources aligned, the faster a ticket is closed. Automated incident tracking software aims to give your business its time back, so you can focus on what really matters. |
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Follow best practices of the ITIL framework through incident management softwareSince ITIL is a framework, the adoption of ITIL best practices vary from one organization to another. We help you adopt and support ITIL best practices by giving you the power to assess your employees’ needs. For both requesters and agents, incidents and impacted assets are matched with relevant solutions articles. And once your IT team has received a ticket, they can quickly fulfill employee needs by visualizing the full incident lifecycle while keeping ITIL best practices in mind by easily escalating incidents to a problem or associating them to an upcoming change. |
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Improve IT incident management and reduce resolution times with artificial intelligenceWe know you’re often short on time, so SolarWinds Service Desk uses artificial intelligence to increase your efficiency and productivity. You can accelerate incident resolution because we automatically recommend the right solution for a ticket. Moreover, you can easily consolidate resolution of tickets while escalating related incidents to a problem since we give you suggestions when an incident is similar to other open tickets. Ticket categorization and routing are also streamlined, since we help you select the best matching categories for inbound incidents. |
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IT Asset Management
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Consolidate your assets with a unified IT asset management dashboardConsolidating assets across your organization can enable you to drive consistent IT asset management. Through a single pane of glass, you can observe your technology assets, their functionality, and their role in your server. With SolarWinds® Service Desk API technology, you can easily manage your assets, help desk tickets, and software license updates by visualizing the full asset life cycle to identify areas where you can reduce the overall cost of assets—saving time and money. |
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Automate risk detection by using asset management toolsEnsure your company is (and remains) compliant with software licenses by automating risk detections on your employees’ devices. Service Desk is built to allow you to monitor licenses actively being used and can compare them to the licenses your organization has purchased. You can also proactively manage warranties and asset refresh cycles to ensure your employees can continue using the hardware and software they need to stay productive. |
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Leverage IT asset management to align assets with incidentsGet the full picture of your asset life cycles by aligning incidents to affected assets through an integrated service desk. Service Desk’s REST API technology is designed to allow you to integrate your ticketing process with your asset inventory, which can automatically suggest connections between user issues and asset items. Ticket resolution using SolarWinds Service Desk can also allow you to more easily evaluate break-fixes and changes by automatically capturing and gathering each asset’s incident history. |
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Automatically discover current assets for better IT asset managementWith SolarWinds Service Desk, there’s no need to create long spreadsheets of asset data that require continual updates that are subject to human error. The Discovery Scanner feature is built to collect data on your IP-connected devices, which can provide a highly scalable asset inventory. For non-IP-connected assets, you can manually modify your inventory database as needed. After setup, Discovery Scanner can continuously monitor your network and make automatic updates to your inventory as it evolves. |
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Create a centralized overview of asset configurationsAsset discovery is just the first step of asset lifecycle management. For a holistic management process, you should also understand the functional relationship among your assets. Configuration item data from Service Desk’s Discovery Scanner can build the foundation for a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which can offer a centralized view of your asset configuration to more easily avoid disruptions and understand how the rest of your system is affected when nodes are changed or replaced. |
Employee Service Portal
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Improve productivity by implementing an employee service portalChoose a help desk software to make the service request process as straightforward and painless as possible for both employees and technicians. By submitting requests through the SolarWinds® Service Desk employee service portal, employees gain helpful visibility. They can easily track the progress of their tickets and understand the SLAs attached to their requests. This lets them get back to their jobs with peace of mind. |
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Automatically collect information for data-driven service deliveryNot only is SolarWinds Service Desk portal easy for employees to navigate, but it goes further by offering technicians the unique opportunity to collect and store all the pinpointed information they need to quickly deliver services. With Service Desk you can customize your service catalog and incident submissions to ensure you always have the right information at your fingertips. With a data-driven approach, you can speed delivery to exceed employee expectations. |
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Offer 24/7 access to service and advice through an employee service portalModern employees aren’t always in the office. It’s useful for your employees to access Service Desk wherever they may be. When your employees need answers, the portal gives them direct access to the status of their requests and a direct line of communication with service providers. What’s more, they can attempt to resolve issues on their own with the aid of built-in resources. Give employees a chance to solve simple problems by offering a knowledge base full of solutions for recurring issues. |
Knowledge Base
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Empower employees to resolve issues by offering knowledge base softwareProvide your employees with the resources they need to resolve issues on their own. SolarWinds® Service Desk offers an employee self-service portal with a knowledge base help desk full of step-by-step articles and tutorials. These resources address a wide range of tech questions and concerns, allowing employees to resolve issues independently. AI features further streamline this process, providing a familiar, predictive search experience designed to guide users to specific articles. |
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Leverage knowledge base management tools to consolidate technical resourcesOften, a service request or a ticket refers to an issue that has happened before. But repeat issues don’t have to mean repeat solutions. Save your technicians’ time and energy with the most up-to-date knowledge base articles, videos, and tutorials. If an article isn’t available via the knowledge base help desk, quickly translate resolution notes into new resource articles to help others resolve the same issue in the future. |
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Align knowledge base software with inbound tickets to accelerate resolutionAs your knowledge base grows, it can be challenging for employees and IT admins alike to comb through the vast amount of resources available. SolarWinds knowledge base management platform leverages native artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to align existing support articles with all applicable portal searches and inbound tickets and requests. This gives your technicians instant access to the right resources, helping them resolve tickets quickly and efficiently. |
Problem Management
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Easily group similar incidents to streamline problem managementYour service desk will likely receive multiple requests about incidents related to the same issue. Unless service tickets are quickly grouped, this can lead to multiple agents working on the same issue, wasting resources and decreasing productivity. SolarWinds® Service Desk can help you quickly group together incidents related to a single issue, eliminating redundancy and ensuring agents are working on distinct problems. |
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Align incidents for quick diagnosis and resolutionAligning incidents related to a single issue can expedite diagnosis and resolution. Incidents can become a bigger problem when left unresolved. SolarWinds Service Desk automates the ticket categorization process, efficiently routing service tickets related to a single issue right to the technician who can solve them. This eliminates confusion over ticket routing and accelerates the resolution process. |
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Keep team members in the loop with status updates and alertsCommunication is key when you have a problem impacting employees across your organization. Let them know you’re on top of it and provide temporary workaround solutions. SolarWinds Service Desk can facilitate better communication and improve transparency. Managers and leaders can keep other team members updated by sending mass status updates and alerts. Everyone can be kept informed of progress or roadblocks. |
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Align processes with change and configuration managementChanges from different incidents can impact more than just the IT desk. Internal operations can be affected, leading to widespread issues. SolarWinds Service Desk assists your team in keeping track of changes and configurations that may cause problems. Service Desk can align with your configuration management database (CMDB) for greater visibility into changes for hardware and software assets across your organization. |
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Build historical data to improve future planningHaving a comprehensive understanding of changes and service trends can accelerate the problem resolution process. In fact, using an ITIL framework to streamline resolutions means building historical data for more proactive resolutions of future issues. With SolarWinds Service Desk, you can automatically build a backlog of past incidents. Easily run reports on historical problems or view trends in service delivery for better visibility into your process. |
What’s the difference between help desk and service desk?
What’s the difference between help desk and service desk?
When it comes to help desk vs. service desk, there are definite similarities. However, under the ITIL framework, the two are different. The first important distinction when considering the difference between help desk and service desk is its focus. The IT help desk is end-user focused. The IT service desk, on the other hand, is both end-user-focused and internally focused. The help desk deals with individual user questions, issues, and problems under the purview of the service desk. The help desk works for ticket resolution. In other words, IT help desks are tactical because they’re in place to solve problems as they arise. The help desk troubleshoots or resolves the issue for the user then closes the ticket, thus ending their responsibility in the matter. The service desk isn't just a renamed help desk, but rather acts as a point of contact for service requests, problem management, and configuration changes. The service desk is more focused on enabling business processes and providing integrated support for business impact with a focus on more formalized integrated business processes. The service desk also adapts to changing needs in the workplace and helps the help desk adapt, too. Larger companies with lots of users and a complex IT infrastructure need both a help desk to address individual user issues and an all-encompassing service desk to oversee the lay of the land.
What is the IT service desk?
What is the IT service desk?
The IT service desk has an overarching goal of improving IT processes, monitoring and assessing current processes and trends, and looking for opportunities for IT processes to run more efficiently. The goal of the IT service desk is to restore the end user to productivity, using problem resolution, end-user education, or sometimes generating a workaround. To do this optimally, it has to understand the end-user experience and meet the end user where they are technologically. The IT service desk is responsible for tracking tickets and identifying recurring issues and problems that need to be resolved once and for all. And, by keeping services up to date with current technologies, the service desk assures services work properly. As the service desk becomes more integrated with overall business practices, service desk software has had to learn to integrate nicely with other software used throughout the enterprise.
Where are all these tickets coming from?
Where are all these tickets coming from?
In any business, there are many different types of service desk requests, each of which must be handled in a specific way. Employees can’t spend time refreshing email and waiting for a response to a service desk ticket critical to their business productivity. It’s important to source every ticket or incident to an origin, including the portal, chat, email, API call, or manual entry by a technician. With SolarWinds Service Desk, you have one place to streamline and organize the tickets and requests coming in through different mediums, including email, phone calls, a customized Service Portal, and even the occasional (or extremely frequent) walk up.
How do I relate tickets to see if I have a problem?
How do I relate tickets to see if I have a problem?
Sometimes the service desk (or service desk software) notes several incidents of the same nature in different departments that keep repeating despite troubleshooting. IT logs problems, categorizes them, and prioritizes them. They investigate and diagnose and develop a workaround. Service desk software should provide a robust ticketing system, with automation in place to speed up the identification, logging, categorization, prioritization, and diagnosis of problems. Problems are IT's long-term pains and “hard-to-diagnose” challenges. They can be long-term conundrums without clear answers, and sometimes, no one is 100 percent sure who's in charge of fixing them. Good problem management, however, prevents many incidents, and a service desk software should equip you to address both. SolarWinds Service Desk can help you follow ITIL best practices with escalation of incidents built in to the service desk, so a ticket can quickly move to a potential problem or be associated to an upcoming change or release.
How do I route service tickets to the right personnel or teams?
How do I route service tickets to the right personnel or teams?
Many departments may have their own internal processes, how-to documentation, and other resources, but these can be difficult to manage and difficult for employees to access if not centralized in a single platform. Streamline ticket routing by building the rules in your SolarWinds Service Desk to get tickets and requests to the right individuals and teams quickly. This removes ticket routing bottlenecks, resolving tickets and requests faster. Maybe your organization has different incident management protocols based on the category (or department) the ticket originates. Route tickets by categories such as application support, hardware support, HR or benefits, or facility requests to make sure your ticket isn’t spending time going through the wrong channels. Get it to where it needs to be immediately. Automated routing, ticket escalations, status updates, workflows, approval notifications, and SLA breach protocols have proven valuable in IT. If there’s any scenario where “if a, then b” should always be true, you can create a ticket automation rule to get the ticket into the right hands for efficient and fast support.
How do I use the knowledge base to increase self-service?
How do I use the knowledge base to increase self-service?
The knowledge base helps cut down time wasted on repetitive tickets, which is a huge benefit to service providers. Whether it’s a password reset, a change to a 401(k) contribution, or a request to book a conference room, your organization can create a knowledge database within your service desk to answer questions. When repeat questions come in, there’s no need to retype the solution over and over again; just point, click, and send a solutions article. When an article needs an update, you can grant service providers the ability to submit changes for approval. Fully customize your SolarWinds Service Desk knowledge base with step-by-step articles and tutorials, including images, videos, and links. This smart tech can empower both your employees to resolve tickets on their own or give your IT pros quick articles to send out at the click of a button. Give your employees complete transparency into the status of their tickets and requests. Through the SolarWinds Service Desk employee service portal (or email), your employees can comment on tickets and participate in the resolution by completing approvals and tasks associated to their requests.
How do I attach service tickets to IT assets?
How do I attach service tickets to IT assets?
In today’s environment, IT asset management and service desk should live in a unified state. Employees and their assets are attached from the day they begin work at your organization, and the data from both can easily help connect you to their needs quickly. Practically every ticket or request involves a user and one of their devices. Often, the issue will involve an application, software, or tool. By attaching all this data in one solution, you can easily connect employees with self-service, better plan for changes, and deliver faster solutions. By unifying service desk and IT asset management (ITAM) capabilities, your organization can take a more comprehensive approach to tracking technology investments to incorporate service and repair activities into each asset’s history. Fully integrated IT asset management capabilities allow you to capture over 200 data points and continually monitor your computer and server inventory within the SolarWinds Service Desk, and gain a consolidated view on what’s loaded on the devices, who owns them, and where they’re located. SolarWinds Discovery integrates with Service Desk and gives IT pros a complete and accurate picture of their software and hardware infrastructure. These insights allow you to proactively address potential risks to IT services availability.
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