Jira Service Management vs. SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD)

Great to manage your issues in a clear and centralised way. If your development teams work with Jira, it will all naturally come together. Great way to manage the issues from end to end. - Very flexible if you have people who understands the set up and is able to configure it for your needs - Maybe not the best if you want something with very easy set up

[SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD)] works well in education, I'm responsible for over 500 classrooms, thousands of users and computers. Using WHD to keep track of who has what devices and which devices need to be retired has helped the user experience. I'd recommend this product to anyone managing an IT department.

Incentivized

• Highly configurable Notification Scheme, allowing free customization on who receives notifications and when
• Ability to add extra features through the highly diverse Atlassian Marketplace.
• Simple and highly customizable ticket interface. The Software can be almost completely branded in every aspect to represent your organization.
• Integration with Jira Software allows support tickets to be moved into other Log Term projects as necessary.

Incentivized

• Email notifications are pretty good; you can add hidden notes, close/resolve/update tickets just by selecting the appropriate link in the email that is sent when a ticket is created or edited.
• It provides a great deal of information to both the user and tech.
• It allows us to automatically update asset information with our mobile device management system by using an extension.

Incentivized

• Some of the built-in functions and workflows are surprisingly limited given the fact that you can customize a lot with JQL. These limited areas do not allow you to use JQL. For instance, the built-in notifications are lacking. They have one that is great-- "notify on critical ticket creation"-- EXCEPT that it does not allow you to notify a group or anything, only individual users.
• The ticket interface is a little odd for agents. Changing the status is not a simple drop down from unassigned to open to in progress to pending, etc. There are a couple of tabs ("investigate", "pending", "workflow") where you can change the status in different ways. Maybe I am just not used to this way of doing it, but I feel like it could be simplified.
• It can get complicated deleting/changing some of the out-of-the-box fields and rules, because you never know what will break workflows or other automated/built-in features.

Incentivized

• I have been a user for over 8 years and the product continues to exceed my expectations!
• I am amazed at the fact that the users have an impact on how the product continues to evolve
• Continued efforts put forth on the security of all the SolarWinds products have been amazing

Incentivized

We are definitely going to be sticking with Web Help Desk for the foreseeable future since the product is very inexpensive for the features that it provides, the integration that it has with our existing systems, and the ease for managing users, assets, locations, and tickets. Web Help Desk is a great product that is backed by even better support, which is well worth looking into if you are considering moving to a new ticketing system.

Incentivized

I have given this rating because, in my opinion, I don't see any downsides of Jira until now. We can customise workflows based on the project needs, including task workflows. Jira is very extensible, which is one of its most important features.

Incentivized

It's not cloud based so users have to be on the network to submit a ticket. It doesn't plug into Google or Microsoft Azure so all inventory has to be manually entered. It seems like solar winds is allowing the product to slow fall into obsolescence

Incentivized

I gave JIRA a 9 rating since for me JIRA works according to its purpose. Since there is a customer portal, our clients can leave a comment or communicate with us using the PR ticket that way it is easier for us to also request any additional information we need for our investigation.

SolarWinds is a great customizable and affordable ticketing system. We use SolarWinds Web Help Desk for IT and Software
Development trouble ticket tracking and resolution. The reporting that
SolarWinds provides is great since it helps us discover problem areas and fix
those areas so they don't keep reoccurring

Incentivized

Take the time to roll out a test VM to configure and make changes to before doing a live deployment, this way you don't end up with a VM that has been tweaked and re-tweaked until it's perfect and instead end up with a final, polished product. I would also recommend taking the time to read through the support forums for figuring out minor issues that may pop up, chances are that you aren't going to be the first one to encounter them. When all is said and done, SolarWinds Support is VERY responsive and you shouldn't hesitate to contact them.

Incentivized

We chose Jira Service Management due to its easy integrations with the rest of the Atlassian tools, as we have also invested in those. For the price, the ability to add or remove agents, and the cost being reflected in that, it was an excellent medium for us. For the foreseeable future, I do not see us moving off this platform.

Incentivized

I used ManageEngine ServiceDesk and ServiceNow at previous jobs. SolarWinds Web Help Desk was in place when I came to this job and I was disappointed when I started using it as it has a more clunky, less intuitive interface, and lacks the features of those products. And it gets frustrating because sometimes it doesn't work right. Like I will open a ticket and click on the button to add a note and instead it will close the Notes section. So then I have to close and reopen the ticket and try again. Same with closing a ticket. I change the Status to "closed" and click on "Save" and it doesn't save. So I have to keep repeating this until it works. Also, it's lacking features like the ability to unmerge or split tickets, that I had in other products. And sometimes when users reply to tickets it creates another ticket instead of adding it to the existing ticket and then we have to merge tickets. Also, it's lacking the integration with users and assets that those other products have.

Incentivized

• It has allowed us to take on a larger volume of work at a faster pace.
• We have established best practices with the tool that we have taught and sold to clients.
• It has allowed for further collaboration with a larger team.

Incentivized

• Overall we have become more efficient using this tool and our ROI for implementing this has been great. By having a service tool that can manage inventory, tickets, as well as change management just to name a few, our company is better off in our support.
• The core business community has seen quicker responses to tickets through use of the ticketing tool. Business continuity has had less disruptions as we are better able to anticipate or respond to issues.
• Finance has been happier with our ability to do cost analysis by using the various tools in SolarWinds help desk.

Incentivized