After two decades in senior roles across the MSP landscape I’ve rolled out nearly every service-desk platform on the market: ConnectWise, Kaseya BMS, Autotask, Zendesk, Freshdesk—the list is long and my scars are real. None has matched SolarWinds Service Desk for sheer simplicity, cost efficiency and speed of deployment. Too many teams still funnel support requests through Outlook folders; that practice locks you at the very bottom of the ITSM maturity model, where processes are ad-hoc and results unpredictable. (itserviceweek.com)
If you’re serious about climbing those maturity levels—moving from reactive firefighting to measured, value-driven service management—SolarWinds gives you the quickest on-ramp I’ve ever seen. Two licences, an afternoon of configuration and your organisation moves from email chaos to a structured, auditable, workflow-rich platform that every department can share. Take it from someone who has truly tried them all: the time for ITSM maturity is now, and this is the tool to get you there.
Through this article I’ve tried to be measured and “not a fan boy” by referencing my claims from third party sources. Sure, I love SolarWinds have deep roots in the organisation, but I only ever write about what I believe in – and this is one of those topics.
In many organisations half of the staff rely completely on an external provider for technology care, while the other half work shoulder to shoulder with an in-house IT crew. This article is written for both camps, for CIOs who need proof of value, for service desk managers who want fewer emails, and for department heads who wish every request arrived with context rather than chaos. You will learn why SolarWinds Service Desk, originally Samanage, is the tool we recommend, how its ITIL aligned practices work, and what each business unit can automate from day one.
Activate two Essentials seats for A$39 a technician each month, connect Microsoft 365 for single sign on, load a starter catalogue, and by close of business your executives will see live dashboards that track incident volume, request age, and service level compliance across IT, HR, and Finance. The generous API, ready made Microsoft Teams and Slack apps, and thirty day fully featured trial lower the risk even further. (solarwinds.com)
SolarWinds Service Desk, rebuilt after the 2019 acquisition of Samanage, is a cloud native platform that covers every core practice in IT service management. It offers incident, problem, change, release, request, asset, and configuration management in one interface, and layers AI-driven virtual agents plus runbooks in the higher tiers. (thwack.solarwinds.com)
Incident management restores normal service when something fails, for example when a user cannot connect to Wi Fi. The clock is short and the goal is rapid recovery. Problem management looks for recurring causes behind many incidents and removes them, perhaps by replacing a faulty driver or updating firmware. Clear separation of these two practices prevents firefighting from swallowing root cause work. (itsm.tools)
Let’s look at Incident Management in SolarWinds Service Desk for a second shall we?
You’ll see in the screenshot here everything you’d expect to see if you’re familiar with ticketing tools, tickets can be classified by priority, category (server vs desktop etc), you can post a great resolution, and you can tag your friends. When the ticket is resovled, you can put a great resolution note in that then becomes part of your knowledgebase, training the AI engine behind the scenes for future suggestions! If you have multiple support levels, right out of the box you can assign work by team like “IT level 1, level 2 and level 3”, so you’re not relying on any one individual on your service desk either.
The automation rules are incredible too, someone on leave? Not a problem, when they set up an out of office in SolarWinds Service Desk, your automation rules can sweep through and reallocate tickets for you, to your colleagues and peers, which is just one example of the power of the platform.
Every enhancement or fix is a change. The change practice evaluates risk, secures approvals, schedules work, and verifies success. Release management moves approved change packages into production with consistent methods and rollback plans. SolarWinds includes predefined workflows that follow ITIL guidance and records full audit trails for regulators and boards. (documentation.solarwinds.com)
A CMDB is a living catalogue of hardware, software, cloud services, and how they relate. When a payroll outage arrives, the analyst can open the incident, click the affected application, and see its underlying server, database, and network path without manual detective work. SolarWinds discovers these items automatically and draws relationship maps inside the browser, saving weeks of spreadsheet effort. (itsm.tools)
At its simplest, your CMDB can look like the image below, an automated discovery of all your assets using SolarWinds Service Desk and it’s asset discovery tool.
SolarWinds Service Desk may have been born in IT, but its workflow engine, self-service portal, and unlimited-requester licensing make it a platform for any team that delivers a service to someone else. Think of it as a company-wide “getting-things-done layer.”
Picture the CEO’s dashboard: marketing requests turned round in hours, HR onboardings closed on the first day, finance approvals tracked to the minute—and every interaction visible, audited, and reportable. Customers raise tickets in the same portal, and the whole organisation rallies behind the fix, with ownership crystal-clear at every hand-off. That’s the power of bringing every department onto one service backbone.
|
Group |
Everyday win |
Service Desk feature |
|---|---|---|
|
Internal IT |
Auto routes priority incidents to the right queue, measures mean time to resolution, and warns of SLA breaches |
Categories, automation rules, service level calendars |
|
HR |
On boarding creates child tasks for laptop, payroll, building access, and welcome email, all visible to the hiring manager |
Service catalogue, task groups, approvals |
|
Finance |
Hardware depreciation, contract renewal, and licence compliance tracked in one report |
Asset module, contract management, software audits |
|
Facilities |
Air conditioning tickets log location, trigger maintenance, and trend analysis predicts failures |
Custom fields, scheduled reports, mobile app |
The same portal that unites HR, Finance and IT also becomes your public-facing service window. Instead of phoning reception or guessing an email address, customers open a single branded site, choose a request type written in plain language and upload screenshots or files on the spot. As soon as the ticket is saved, they receive an acknowledgment, an expected response time and a live progress bar that updates whenever an agent changes status or posts a note. No more “Just following up” emails—everything is transparent in real time.
Self-service goes a step further: the moment a customer starts typing, the portal searches your knowledge base and surfaces relevant how-to articles, user guides or password-reset steps. Every successful self-help deflects a ticket and shortens your queue, yet the customer still feels looked after. If they do continue, the form captures all the structured details your agents need—device, location, urgency—so first contact resolution becomes the norm. Satisfaction surveys pop automatically on closure, feeding CSAT scores straight into your dashboards for continuous improvement.
Because the portal sits on the same SolarWinds backbone as your monitoring and CMDB, context flows both ways. An alert from Observability can raise an incident, post a proactive message to the customer portal (“We’re aware of slow log-ins and are working on it”) and stop duplicate tickets before they start. Customers see a professional status update, agents avoid noise and management gets credit for being ahead of the problem
SolarWinds Service Desk is delivered from a regional cloud that was purpose-built for ITSM workloads. For Australian organisations, all production data sits in SolarWinds’ Sydney data centre, opened specifically to meet local sovereignty mandates and to cut latency for APJ customers.(datacenterplanet.com) (ibtimes.com.au) (technologydecisions.com.au) Data remains encrypted at rest and in transit, and backups never leave the same jurisdiction.
Access to the tenant is locked down with single sign-on (SAML or OIDC) plus optional multi-factor authentication, so your existing identity provider enforces its normal policies—conditional access, passwordless sign-in, geofencing, you name it. Administrators can mandate MFA for every agent, disable legacy passwords, and issue expiring API tokens with scoped permissions. (documentation.solarwinds.com)
Every click in the interface—field edits, status changes, permission tweaks—is written to an immutable audit log. Thirty days of history are queryable in-app, while a full CSV export keeps the entire record set for external retention or forensic analysis. Those logs, together with near-real-time event webhooks and a REST API, funnel straight into your SIEM for correlation with network, endpoint, and cloud telemetry. (documentation.solarwinds.com)
Behind the scenes, SolarWinds develops and operates the platform under its “Secure by Design” initiative, following NIST’s Secure Software Development Framework and maintaining third-party attestations such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2. Continuous vulnerability scanning, strict change control, and segregated build pipelines reduce the blast radius of any component failure. (solarwinds.com)
In short, you gain the scale and agility of SaaS without surrendering control. Data stay onshore, identities stay in your IdP, and every transaction is traceable—giving CISOs, auditors, and regulators the transparency they demand while letting support teams focus on outcomes instead of infrastructure.
We know that AI is the hottest thing in town right now, and SolarWinds Service Desk is built for it! A drag and drop flow builder lets you set conditions and actions without code. For example, any ticket from the executive network, tagged high priority, can page the on call engineer, post into Teams, and create a change draft automatically. Advanced and Premier tiers introduce a conversational virtual agent that suggests knowledge articles, logs requests, and escalates only when self help fails. Premier also unlocks SolarWinds AI, which builds runbooks by analysing resolved tickets, speeding new hires through complex fixes. (techradar.com)
Alerts from SolarWinds Observability or Orion arrive as rich incidents complete with metric graphs, node details, and topology context, allowing operators to see cause and impact in one place. Webhooks and the REST API link Service Desk to DevOps pipelines, procurement platforms, and human resource systems. Because every tier permits unlimited requesters the whole company can submit and track work without extra licence cost.
The integration market place is as extensive as you’d expect and does what it says it does, on the tin. There are some great integrations like the integration to Harvest, for managers that need that data. And the integration with Zapier opens up a world of possibility! The integration with remote support software like LogMeIn or Teamviewer is also commendable, or even SolarWinds own Dameware Remote Control, giving teams the ability to remote to devices with ease, barely leaving the Service Desk Platform.
Essentials at A$39 a technician a month covers incidents, knowledge base, portal, and surveys. Advanced at A$79 a technician adds automation, custom fields, a standard virtual agent, network discovery, and scheduled reports. Premier at A$99 a technician adds visual CMDB, advanced AI, runbooks, and a higher API rate limit suited to heavy integration work. All plans include a thirty day free trial and unlimited end users. solarwinds.com
Kick off and design, week one
Stakeholders agree objectives, scope, and communication rhythm. Single sign on is enabled and data import templates are prepared.
Configuration and pilot, weeks two and three
Categories, SLA calendars, portal branding, and a starter service catalogue go live for IT. Pilot users log real incidents and knowledge articles grow organically.
Expansion, weeks four to six
HR onboarding, finance purchase orders, and facilities maintenance templates are added. Change practice is turned on, the CMDB completes discovery, and dashboards appear on executive screens.
Handover and continuous improvement, week eight
alltasksIT supplies documentation, recordings, and improvement backlog. Monthly support reviews keep the platform aligned with new business goals.
The service is SaaS, so there is no hardware order, and the SolarWinds deployment services guide requires projects to finish within sixty days, which protects momentum and budget.
Our customer base splits evenly between fully outsourced and co managed models. That experience means we can guide in house IT teams through best practice without taking over, or we can run the whole desk when staff prefer to focus on strategy. We use SolarWinds Service Desk internally so every configuration, report, and automation we recommend has been proven under our own SLA pressure.
Book a thirty minute demonstration, activate two Essentials licences, connect Microsoft 365, raise one HR onboarding request, and watch the dashboards populate. If you prefer evidence, run the thirty day Premier trial and measure how many emails disappear.
SolarWinds Service Desk replaces guesswork with data, silos with shared context, and firefighting with measured improvement. Start small today, expand as confidence grows, and give every department clear insight into service performance.
Chief Customer Officer
Mark Boyd is a Chief Customer Officer (CCO), plays a key executive role responsible for overseeing the entire customer experience within alltasksIT. The CCO serves as the voice of the customer at the highest levels of the company, ensuring that customer-centric strategies are developed and implemented across all departments.
