SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD) vs. Vanta

If you are looking for a way to support a company and bill based on the outcome this software works really well. If it's a quick password change there was no charge, but if it's troubleshooting things you click the box to charge. It works really well for this. Also bringing all your assets into this and associating them to a client works well. I can't think of anything that this software would not be less appropriate for. It works well for what we use it for.

Incentivized

Vanta seems excellent for startups, but I expect that they would be even more useful at bigger companies. I think it really helps people that haven't done SOC2 before. I also think it would help in monitoring compliance across teams with many users. If the budget is extremely tight, I think it would be possible to save money by not using it.

Incentivized

• Approval flows: You can have multiple layers of approval required for the tickets and service requests you design. This helps us show auditors that access to privileged systems and data was formerly reviewed and approved by the appropriate managers.
• Easy to design forms: You don't need to spend hours reading the documentation to figure out how to create forms. It's simple enough that you can just jump right in and start creating them with minimal training.
• Lots of options and features are available for you to include in your forms.
• Integrates well with SAML-based SSO and has capabilities for MFA.
• Easy and useful search function. Need to find that ticket from last year that you worked for a particular user or issue? Just search by keyword or username, and it'll quickly find the ticket.

Incentivized

• Integrations with source control and infrastructure providers.
• Guidance around what makes a company's policy secure.
• Portals that supply our auditors with everything they need to write their reports.

Incentivized

• Being a web platform, some of the refresh is problematic. Not sure this can be solved in the tool, it's important to have a clear understanding who owns the ticket.
• Some time the performance / update speed is slow, but I have to give them credit, this has never resulted in an outage and in general it is solved within a couple of hours.

Incentivized

• Alerts and employee onboarding and offboarding were not entirely complete when we started using the product.
• It would be nice if we could assign policies to specific people in the Vanta app.
• Sometimes, refreshing the tests when you make the changes to pass takes a little more time than desired.

Incentivized

My renewal is soon coming up, it is fairly likely I will renew again for the 5th year. I may consider evaluating what else is out there, It was requested by my staff to not make a change. They feel that SSD fits our needs, is easy to use and should keep it.

Incentivized

Great to maintain for our SOC2 compliance and further compliance evolutions

Incentivized

The stem is easy to use. Having transitioned from Solarwinds Web HelpDesk, the usability change was massive! This has an easy to use interface, common options are front and centre so this makes it simple for staff to dive into. The mobile app makes on the go work easy as well. Being able to snap a picture for a ticket is very helpful.

Incentivized

In my experience, the sheer volume of tasks and to do items is a bit inundating.

For the most part the availability is fine. However, every now and then we have an issue where the system is very slow to respond. It can go from 2-5 seconds to load a page to 15-20 seconds to load a page. That doesn't seem like much. But, when you spend most of your day in the system, those extra seconds add up.

Incentivized

Always available

Incentivized

We don't integrate Solarwinds with any other software or system so I can't comment on that, but the few times there has been an outage for SolarWinds/Samanage the notification has come quickly that there is an outage and they're working on it. Overall though everything loads quickly and it is very reliable

Incentivized

Fast although the agent may take some time to reping on checks

Incentivized

Only had to use support to help launch the service. Do wish they would have some templates in place that support would have provided. It did feel like we did most of the work even though we paid for a support package.

Incentivized

Direct support and replies in a timely manner to tickets submitted

Incentivized

Pretty straight forward

Incentivized

When we first purchased Samanage (now Solarwinds) they provided us with an informational training session to show us all of the basics on how the service works and showed us everything we were interested in using. There are still some areas of Solarwinds that we do not yet utilize but I know if we choose to use them in the future we would be able to schedule another session with our representative to have them show us what we need to know.

Incentivized

Straight Forward

Incentivized

The implementation process for our organization was fairly simple. We set up an email address to receive the emails from the system (for incident creation), and we allowed the system to spoof our IT email to respond to requests. Solarwinds helped us with the rest of the implementation, and it took less than a week to get the system fully operational.

Incentivized

Pretty seemless and did it almost entirely myself

Incentivized

SSD has more features and simplicity in implementation, and working with it is very important to us. It is also very reputable in terms of company security and safety. Helpdesk software should be designed user-friendly in mind. The SolarWinds desktop is created in the cloud and works in the secure cloud, and is constantly updated for usability and performance. We looked at different platforms, most of them were limited and must buy a separate plugin and module for every common feature, but SolarWinds has all the basic features as standard and by default.

Osano and Vanta both meet our requirements at a comparable rate. When comparing quality of ongoing product support, we felt that Vanta is the preferred option. For feature updates and roadmaps, we preferred the direction of Osano over Vanta.

Incentivized

We have over 500 computers and tablets across our organization and this has helped us greatly in keeping track of where computers are and who is currently using it. I can see this product being useful to groups both larger and smaller than us and I really appreciate this product.

Incentivized

Works as intended

Incentivized

• With SLAs, better reporting, and a single incident portal, the productivity of both service desk staff and users has improved. Incidents are tracked and responded to more quickly and fewer incidents "fall through the cracks".
• Purchasing approval workflow has focused technology purchasing priorities.
• Tracking contract expiration ensures services stay available.

Incentivized

• In my experience, they aren't really helpful after all. They ended causing more problems when documents went missing on our trust page. They caused us some embarrassment when we referred people to a mostly empty page.
• They are now attempting to, in my opinion, force us to renew service.