The BMC Helix Configuration Management Database (CMDB, formerly known as Atrium CMDB) is a configuration management database.
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Freshservice
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Freshservice is a cloud-based service desk and IT service management (ITSM) solution that currently serves more than 10,000 SMB, mid-market, and enterprise customers worldwide.
Track and manage hardware, software, and cloud service configuration and relationship. Measure the success of your configuration management process and policy with predefined KPIs. Automatically populate and update CMBD minutes with BCM Helix Discovery, BMC Helix Client Management, and other connectors. Import and federate data from other sources with powerful Integra tools using a rich set of API.
Freshservice is a great all round product with many features. Asset management, Reporting, ticketing, automatization. It was much easier for us using the Freshservice app to scan barcodes for our new devices to get them in the asset management tool, automating certain tasks such as service requests for new devices automatically making a ticket and assigning assets to certain people and getting reports from this afterwards. For a medium to large size company this is great value. For a smaller business there are smaller bundles they provide which are much more affordable in case you do not need all of the features they provide. In summary, lots of features for a snappy, responsive piece of software.
Asset Management Module: The features I like most in this module are the discovery agent software, which allows us to collect device information without manual intervention, and the simplicity and robustness of the module itself.
Service Catalog: This feature allows us to create forms tailored to specific service requests based on group requirements. The ability to customize forms greatly helps both us and our end-users provide the necessary information to fulfill their requests.
Workflow Automator and Business Rules: These two allow us to have some automation in place, eliminating some of the manual steps and decreasing the number of human errors that may happen due to manual changes.
We are pretty invested in Freshservice right now and have integrated it pretty heavily into our environment, so it would be hard to move away from it. For the most part, we are happy with Freshservice and the ease of use it gives us in managing tickets through the system. The only complaint we've had is customer service.
Once you have an understanding of the many use cases that this software can meet, you will be able to tightly integrate this into a ticketing system which increases the ROI of the product tremendously.
Easy to navigate and use GUI. We have many infrastructure team members from various departments using Freshservice and their on-boarding and training was very straightforward and we have not received much, if any negative feedback from non-technology users in regards to overall usability, interface or functionality.
Most reports are quick, however, it can take some time for emailed exports to come via email. It would be helpful to have the exports live in the system rather than having to wait on emails.
Support from OEM is decent but needs improvement. Sometimes OEM also needs to understand the criticality of the customer and help as an Ad-hoc, which is somewhat lacking at Feshservice. Although the normal support team is well-equipped and helps according to the matrix, if something critical for the partner or customer requires immediate attention, it still goes through the L1-L2-L3 levels, which wastes a lot of time.
Their documentation is pretty good, but only available in English. This makes it difficult for some of our users to understand. There are also some basic video courses available.
Creating the correct groups for the stakeholders and enabling the right notifications are one of the most important aspect of the implementation. Creating Change templates will also help in the long run and it's a good practice to create one, if applicable.
Let's detect potential conflicts when multiple changes are scheduled for the same time. Understand what services are affected by the ticket you're working on. Automatically route tickets to the potential solver based on CMDB data. Retrieve detailed configuration data for the assets you are troubleshooting. Resolve tickets faster. It is highly scalable.
Freshservice is ahead in some areas, behind in others. For example, workspaces have been part of other products for many years. Freshworks just introduced it in 2023. Integration with productivity tools is better than past products we have used. Apps continue to be added as well. We selected Freshservice as it was the best mix of functionality and cost. We don't need solutions as robust as ServiceNow, for example, but found that Freshservice had some comparable advanced features.
Alleviate our support team by providing knowledge directly to the end users.
Better response times from our IT support team, thanks to automation and dashboard use.
Better tracking of our assets by assigning them to users so we know which device was handed out to who. During off-boarding, we know which devices to ask back.
